quotations about poetry
Poetry is art, but poetry contests are sport, bound by rules as exacting as any that govern collegiate competition.
ZUSHA ELINSON
"Poetry Is Art, but Poetry Slams Are Sport, Bound by Pages of Rules", Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2016
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
You speak
As one who fed on poetry.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Richelieu
A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the Polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.
JOHN KEATS
letter to Benjamin Bailey, October 8, 1817
None knows the reason why this curse
Was sent on him, this love of making verse.
HORACE
Ars Poetica
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
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and wisely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Heinrich Heine", Essays in Criticism, First Series
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
There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.
EDWARD HIRSCH
interview, 2007
When an exquisite poem brings one's eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III", L'art romantique
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
For verses and poems I can turn to true food.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don't know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren't bothered by each other.
T. S. ELIOT
The Paris Review, spring-summer 1959
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
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
JEAN COCTEAU
"Le Secret Professionnel", A Call to Order
But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses of Aeschylus, and the book of Job, and Dante's Paradise, would afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if the limits of this essay did not forbid citation. The creations of sculpture, painting, and music, are illustrations still more decisive.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
The Atlantic Online, September 18, 1997
If you can't be a bad poet at seventeen, with your brother dying just down the corridor, what hope is there for poetry?
BERNARD BECKETT
Lullaby
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