quotations about poetry
As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Rain Taxi, winter 2000/2001
Poetry is the music of the soul, and above all, of great and feeling souls.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Louis Lambert
The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, -- the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
Poetry has the power to turn words into darts that shoot under your skin.
PENNY ASHTON
"Poetry Idol's organiser is shocked and saddened to learn that slam poetry is 'dumb-ass and not good'", The Spinoff, April 28, 2016
It has been said that all the arts are constantly attempting, within their respective spheres, to attain to something of the quality of music, to assume, whether in pigment, or pencil, or marble, or prose, something of its speed and flash, emotional completeness, and well-harmonied resonance; but of no other single art is that so characteristically or persistently true as it is of poetry. Poetry is indeed in this regard two-natured: it strikes us, when it is at its best, quite as sharply through our sense of the musically beautiful as through whatever implications it has to carry of thought or feeling: it plays on us alternately or simultaneously through sound as well as through sense.
CONRAD AIKEN
Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry
A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damages.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
The Fall of the Towers
Poets' food is love and fame.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"An Exhortation"
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
JEAN COCTEAU
attributed, Jean Cocteau and the French Scene
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
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
Once I started writing all the time and interacting with poets, I made a conscious decision to identify myself as a poet. It's funny how much a single word can provide focus and direction. As soon as I claimed that identity, I started clearing more and more space for poetry in my life and applying poetic tools to other areas of my life. The world became a different place, and I witnessed it through different kinds of eyes.
TRACY K. SMITH
interview, Gulf Coast, vol. 17, number 1
No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.
T. S. ELIOT
The Music of Poetry
Much of the poetry we know about comes from our high school English classes where teachers turned to the 19th century for inspiration. While some of those poems are wonderful, quite a few are old-fashioned enough to sound obscure, and have contributed to the popular idea that poetry is unfathomable and not something meant for ordinary people. All of this is horse-twaddle, if you'll pardon my French. Poetry is for everyone, and here's how you can tell: whenever something big happens in the world or in an individual life, people turn toward it: Suddenly poems are flying around the internet, being shared, liked, and retweeted hundreds of times. Poems are read at weddings, christenings, and funerals, at opening ceremonies and presidential inaugurals. This is because poetry is the language of emotion.
MOLLY FISK
"Poetry Is All Yours", Women's Voices for Change, April 9, 2016
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"
I despise slam poetry. Not as much as I despise ukulele orchestras, but it's up there. You can make all the connections you like to the spoken word performance poetry of the Beats and hippies of the 1950s and '60s (Allen Ginsberg performing Howl in 1959), Harlem roasts of the '20s and '30s, and Flyting (the bardic insult competitions the Anglo-Nordic peoples filled in the long winters with between the fifth and sixteenth centuries) and good luck to you, but I hate it.
ANDREW PAUL WOOD
"Slam poetry is despicable and dumb-ass and not good", The Spinoff, April 27, 2016
You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
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
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry