POETRY QUOTES VII

quotations about poetry

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

OSCAR WILDE

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

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

MAGGIE GRIMASON

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


You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.

JOHN ADAMS

letter to John Quincy Adams, May 14, 1781

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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

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Poetry is never a sensible choice on financial grounds. Burglary beats poetry, when it comes to making money.

GARRISON KEILLOR

"Does love have to be a five-alarm fire?", Salon, July 15, 1998

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

CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH

"The Poet"


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

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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

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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"

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

JULIAN BARNES

Flaubert's Parrot

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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"

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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

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Poetry is the other way of using language.

HOWARD NEMEROV

Reflexions on Poetry & Politics


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

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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

JAMES FENTON

Ronald Duncan Lecture, 1992

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A small poet repeats himself like a clock.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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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

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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

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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

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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

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