quotations about poetry
The poem that says "I love you" is the little black cocktail dress, the classic thing that everyone would like to have written one of.
JAMES FENTON
BBC Radio, October 4, 1994
I think that believing in language -- in the ability of words to bring even an imagined reality into being -- is a big part of what it means to write poetry. If something like an idea or a belief is capable of being imagined or even described, then the possibility that it will be acted upon becomes much more likely. I think that many of my poems are attempts to take myself up on that premise, to step into conversation with voices and events that require me to decide something: what do I believe is right? What is the more subtle or subjective view of this situation? What must I challenge myself to understand?
TRACY K. SMITH
interview, Ploughshares Literary Magazine, May 30, 2012
Poetry is the other way of using language.
HOWARD NEMEROV
Reflexions on Poetry & Politics
O gracious God! how far have we
Profaned thy heavenly gift of poesy!
JOHN DRYDEN
To the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killegrew
A poem sings with a bad accent in any language not its own.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.
GLEN DUNCAN
I, Lucifer
Poetry is prose in slow motion.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it.
UMBERTO ECO
The Paris Review, summer 2008
A true poet comes among us only once in a generation, sometimes not once in a century, and ... certain civilized nations never produce a great poet. We suffer from dearth of poets, not from lack of love for poetry.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
He that would earn the Poet's sacred name,
Must write for future as for present ages.
CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH
"The Poet"
Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you--like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist--or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
letter to "Scottie" Fitzgerald, August 3, 1940
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
W. H. AUDEN
New Year Letter
A poet does not work by square or line.
WILLIAM COWPER
Conversation
Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.
CHARLES SIMIC
Dime-Store Alchemy
Men of real talents in Arms have commonly approved themselves patrons of the liberal arts and friends to the poets, of their own as well as former times. In some instances by acting reciprocally, heroes have made poets, and poets heroes.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, May 28, 1788
One of the current great problems in the world is fundamentalism of every kind -- political, spiritual -- and poetry is an antidote to fundamentalism. Poetry is about the clarities that you find when you don't simplify. Poetry is about complexity, nuance, subtlety. Poems also create larger fields of possibility. The imagination is limitless, so even when a person is confronted with an unchangeable outer circumstance, one thing poems give you is the sense that there's always, still, a changeability, a malleability, of inner circumstance. That's the beginning of freedom.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"How can poems transform the world? A chat with poet Jane Hirshfield.", Washington Post, May 13, 2015
Poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
MARY OLIVER
A Poetry Handbook
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. His auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
T. S. ELIOT
Tradition and the Individual Talent
Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
letter to Ellen O'Leary, February 3, 1889