quotations about poetry
I think that's the guts of what poetry is about -- feeling, whether it's something nostalgic, or something fearful, or anxiety-producing, or mourning a loss, many different things. It's the feeling of it.
LUKE ANDERSON
"A place for poetry", Echo Press, May 4, 2016
My poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
PABLO NERUDA
Memoirs
Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity.
AMY LOWELL
preface, Tendencies in Modern Poetry
I approach poetry and spirituality like literary nitroglycerin -- a little can do a lot and you better damn well be careful with it.
CRAIG JOHNSON
"A Conversation with Craig Johnson", The Cold Dish
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
The crown of literature is poetry.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Essays in Criticism, Second Series
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Anima Hominis", Per Amica Silentia Lunae
Poets are the chemists of sentiment, for they analyze and purify it.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
None knows the reason why this curse
Was sent on him, this love of making verse.
HORACE
Ars Poetica
Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.
JEAN COCTEAU
"Le Secret Professionnel", A Call to Order
When people say that poetry is merely a luxury for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read much at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language -- and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers -- a language powerful enough to say how it is.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Guardian, November 14, 2008
Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.
JOHN BERGER
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.
MARGARET ATWOOD
On Writing Poetry
When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013
True poetry is not of earth,
'T is more of Heaven by its birth.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
"Parnassus", Cloudrifts at Twilight
A poet hurts himself by writing prose; as a racehorse hurts his motion by condescending to draw a team.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners
The poet's is the highest type of character: other men dwell in the conventional--he chiefly abides in the universal.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
You speak
As one who fed on poetry.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Richelieu
There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.
EDWARD HIRSCH
interview, 2007