quotations about poetry
Sometimes when a prose poem is floundering, I rewrite it as verse, and it's better in that form. The reverse process of verse into prose poem, also works to clarify what's working in the writing and what's not. It's not a blunt line that demarcates the difference between verse and the prose poem.
WALTER BARGEN
"An interview with Walter Bargen, first poet laureate of Missouri"
The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.
HERBERT SPENCER
The Philosophy of Style
Poems do seem to want to announce, over and over, that life's warm zephyrs are blowing past and the gravestones are just beyond the next rise. Little groupings of gravestones, all leaning and cracked, with a rusty black Victorian fence around them. They're just over that rise. Poets never want to forget that. And actually we need to hear that sometimes.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Debate doesn't really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope.... That's something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.
SEAMUS HEANEY
Paris Review, Fall 1997
The worst slam poetry is just banal prose with peculiar line breaks, syllable counting gurning and mime hands. Noble social protest is lost beneath all the posturing self-aggrandisement, faux patois and, ironically "keeping it real". The best Slam poets -- the really good ones who get toured around and awarded residencies even though they rarely, if ever, compete anymore and less often publish -- are genuinely brilliant, cut from the same cloth as the best stand-up comedians and character actors, but are still largely performing dramatic monologues.
ANDREW PAUL WOOD
"Slam poetry is despicable and dumb-ass and not good", The Spinoff, April 27, 2016
The poet is the man that sings,
That plays upon the harp's wild strings,
That reads the tale of starry skies,
That soars aloft on seraph's wings.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN FIELD
"Poetry"
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
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"
Poetry can be a really great outlet for kids and teens. There are so many rules when you're a teen, but writing poetry is totally open-ended. It's a great way for kids and teens to talk about their feelings and what's going on with no rules. Whatever comes out, comes out.
ELISSA DICKSON
"Elissa Dickson is new San Miguel County Poet Laureate", The Daily Planet, May 4, 2016
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
Poetry is indispensable -- if I only knew what for.
JEAN COCTEAU
attributed, The Necessity of Art
Poets' food is love and fame.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"An Exhortation"
Out on the foolish phrase, but there's a hard rhyming without it.
ROBERT BROWNING
letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 26, 1845
No one ever expects poetry to sell.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
If Poetry comes not as naturally as Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
JOHN KEATS
letter to John Taylor, February 27, 1818
Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
MARY OLIVER
A Poetry Handbook
Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
If the poet would avoid pepsis in his patients, his scalpel must be as clean as the surgeon's.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.
CHARLES DICKENS
The Pickwick Papers