POETRY QUOTES III

quotations about poetry

It tells us a great deal about a man to know that he chooses as his form of expression the poetic medium. It tells us, I think, something about his system of ontology. The composition of poetry is evidence that for him values have a reality, and he is capable of emotion upon the subject of value. The entire corpus of the world's poetry rests upon a theory of universal analogy which teaches that all phenomena in some degree resemble each other. There is a minimal truth in even the wildest metaphor simply because the world is, from one point of view, a unitary thing.

RICHARD WEAVER

"Agrarianism in Exile"


Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

A Defence of Poetry

Tags: Percy Bysshe Shelley


You'll find yourself going back to certain poems again and again. After all, they are only words on a page, but you go back because something that really matters to you is evoked in you by the words. And if somebody said to you, Well, what is it? or What do your favorite poems mean?, you may well be able to answer it, if you've been educated in a certain way, but I think you'll feel the gap between what you are able to say and why you go on reading.

ADAM PHILLIPS

The Paris Review, spring 2014

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The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

On Translating Homer

Tags: Matthew Arnold


Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

PLATO

Ion

Tags: Plato


It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

"The Poetic Principle"

Tags: Edgar Allan Poe


Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity.

AMY LOWELL

preface, Tendencies in Modern Poetry

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Poets are the chemists of sentiment, for they analyze and purify it.

ELIZA COOK

Diamond Dust

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'Tis true among fields and woods I sing,
Aloof from cities--that my poor strains
Were born, like the simple flowers you bring,
In English meadows and English lanes.

ALFRED AUSTIN

prelude, Soliloquies in Song

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So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned.

NICHOLSON BAKER

The Anthologist

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Poetry is Life's wild song.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN FIELD

"Poetry"

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Some poems are like the Centaurs--a mingling of man and beast, and begotten of Ixion on a cloud.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Table-Talk

Tags: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Poetry is another way of encouraging people to think and feel deeply about their own lives and their relationships to other people and other communities.

HANNAH ENSOR

"Poetry to fill the air at weekend festival", Tucson Sentinel, April 14, 2016


Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.

GASTON BACHELARD

The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos

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From my earliest sense of self, I knew that I would be--should be--a poet. It was not as if I had a choice; more like the dying beauty all about breathed its last breath in me and commanded that I be doomed to play with words the rest of my days.

DAN SIMMONS

Hyperion

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I string sounds together. But to string them I have to remember a bunch of old ones I heard somewhere and then juggle them into a new rhythm and shape.

FRANK LOESSER

letter to Angel Steinbeck, A Most Remarkable Fella: Frank Loesser and the Guys and Dolls in His Life

Tags: Frank Loesser


Moving through decades of carefully selected writing changes us; it reminds us that poetry is a form of activism and that language can shift our experience and understanding of the world, can do something beyond the page.

ERICA KAUFMAN

"The End of Gender", Boston Review, May 4, 2016


Poetry is God's work.

KATY LEDERER

"An Interview with Katy Lederer", Thermos Magazine, January 21, 2010

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There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

EDWARD HIRSCH

interview, 2007

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A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

SALMAN RUSHDIE

London Independent, February 18, 1989

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