POETRY QUOTES XI

quotations about poetry


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Writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.

CESARE PAVESE
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This Business of Living, November 6, 1937


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Poems want to awaken intimacy, connection, expansion, and wildness.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

interview, Words with Writers, December 5, 2011

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The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.

J. D. SALINGER

"Seymour: An Introduction"

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The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds
Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;
But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,
He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

"The Albotross"

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Once I started writing all the time and interacting with poets, I made a conscious decision to identify myself as a poet. It's funny how much a single word can provide focus and direction. As soon as I claimed that identity, I started clearing more and more space for poetry in my life and applying poetic tools to other areas of my life. The world became a different place, and I witnessed it through different kinds of eyes.

TRACY K. SMITH

interview, Gulf Coast, vol. 17, number 1

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All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Louis Lambert

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Poetry as religion -- I'll drink to that! For me it is a sacred vocation, and one that no one can take away from me. One is a witch in community, one has a job title conferred by an employer: but one can be a poet without approval or sanction from anyone else. Even a child writing their first poems may call themselves a poet. I love that.

YVONNE ABURROW

"On Poetry: A Conversation", Patheos, April 30, 2016


So many poets die ere they are known,
I pray you, hear me kindly for their sake.
Not of the harp, but of the soul alone,
Is the deep music all true minstrels make:
Hear my soul's music, and I will beguile,
With string and song, your festival awhile.

HENRY ABBEY

"The Troubadour"

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The most generous critic, if he is to be discriminating and just, cannot, let me say again, allow that any verse which is profoundly obscure or utterly unmusical, no matter how intellectual in substance, deserves the appellation of poetry.

ALFRED AUSTIN

The Bridling of Pegasus

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You have to write a poem the way you ride a horse--you have to know what to do with it. You have to be in charge of a horse or it will eat all day--you'll never get back to the barn. But if you tell the horse how to be a horse, if you force it, the horse will probably break a leg. The horse and rider have to be together.

JACK GILBERT

The Paris Review, fall/winter 2005

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Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.

CHARLES DICKENS

The Pickwick Papers

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Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.

LOUIS ARAGON

Treatise on Style

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Poets' food is love and fame.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

"An Exhortation"

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For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.

WYNDHAM LEWIS

Tarr

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All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon

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There is a widespread notion in the public mind that poetic inspiration has something mysterious and translunar about it, something which altogether escapes human analysis, which it would be almost sacrilege for analysis to touch. The Romans spoke of the poet's divine afflatus, the Elizabethans of his fine frenzy. And even in our own day critics, and poets themselves, are not lacking who take the affair quite as seriously. Our critics and poets are themselves largely responsible for this -- they are a sentimental lot, even when most discerning, and cannot help indulging, on the one hand, in a reverential attitude toward the art, and, on the other, in a reverential attitude toward themselves.

CONRAD AIKEN

Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry

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Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

A Defence of Poetry

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Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

JEAN COCTEAU

attributed, Jean Cocteau and the French Scene

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Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR

Pericles and Aspasia

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Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory.

JAMES JOYCE

a lecture on James Clarence Mangan delivered at the Literary and Historical Society, University College, Dublin, February 1, 1902

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