POETRY QUOTES VII

quotations about poetry

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

Tags: Austin O'Malley


He that would earn the Poet's sacred name,
Must write for future as for present ages.

CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH

"The Poet"


Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonym of the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty; whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself of language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and delicate combinations, than colour, form, or motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the creation. For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination and has relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments and conditions of art, have relations among each other, which limit and interpose between conception and expression The former is as a mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of which both are mediums of communication. Hence the fame of sculptors, painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of the great masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that of those who have employed language as the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has never equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of the term, as two performers of equal skill will produce unequal effects from a guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators and founders of religions, so long as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed that of poets in the restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a question, whether, if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of the gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with that which belonged to them in their higher character of poets, any excess will remain.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

A Defence of Poetry

Tags: Percy Bysshe Shelley


Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World

Tags: Jane Hirshfield


A poet is a painter in his way, he draws to the life, but in another kind; we draw the nobler part, the soul and the mind; the pictures of the pen shall outlast those of the pencil, and even worlds themselves.

APHRA BEHN

Oroonoko

Tags: Aphra Behn


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

Tags: William Butler Yeats


A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

OSCAR WILDE

"The Children of the Poets", Pall Mall Gazette, October 14, 1886

Tags: Oscar Wilde


Joyous or bereaved, poetry is the ink and paper realm of emotion.

MAGGIE GRIMASON

"The Province of the Heart", Alibi, April 28, 2016


Away! away! I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy.

JOHN KEATS

"Ode to a Nightingale"

Tags: John Keats


A poem sings with a bad accent in any language not its own.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

Tags: Austin O'Malley


Because it thinks by music and image, by story and passion and voice, poetry can do what other forms of thinking cannot: approximate the actual flavor of life, in which subjective and objective become one, in which conceptual mind and the inexpressible presence of things become one.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

Tags: Jane Hirshfield


Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

JULIAN BARNES

Flaubert's Parrot

Tags: Julian Barnes


Poetry is the other way of using language.

HOWARD NEMEROV

Reflexions on Poetry & Politics


It might sound a little glib, but maybe I don't know what a finished poem is. I lean toward the school that a poem is never finished, it's just abandoned.

WALTER BARGEN

"An interview with Walter Bargen, first poet laureate of Missouri"

Tags: Walter Bargen


Babies are not brought by storks, and poets are not produced by workshops.

JAMES FENTON

Ronald Duncan Lecture, 1992

Tags: James Fenton


A small poet repeats himself like a clock.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

Tags: Austin O'Malley


Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

Introduction to Aesthetics

Tags: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel


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

Tags: T. S. Eliot


I hope that the feeling of making poetry is not confined to the people who write it down.... I am sure that the great glory of poetry in one's heart does not wait on achievement.

STELLA BENSON

This Is the End

Tags: Stella Benson


Deprive poetry of this which it has in common with philosophy--the seeing of things as they are--and the beauty and fragrance of the flower are gone.

JOHN GRIER HIBBEN

The Problems of Philosophy

Tags: John Grier Hibben