quotations about poetry
A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests.
JOHN DRYDEN
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Fables, Ancient and Modern
Babies are not brought by storks, and poets are not produced by workshops.
JAMES FENTON
Ronald Duncan Lecture, 1992
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
Poesy is a part of learning in measure of words, for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination; which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things.
FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry: on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose ; and neither fan nor burned feather can bring her to herself again.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
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"
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
Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.
JEAN COCTEAU
"Le Secret Professionnel", A Call to Order
No really sensible person ever remembers enough poetry to recite it.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
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
'Tis true among fields and woods I sing,
Aloof from cities--that my poor strains
Were born, like the simple flowers you bring,
In English meadows and English lanes.
ALFRED AUSTIN
prelude, Soliloquies in Song
Poetry is the music of the soul, and above all, of great and feeling souls.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.
CHARLES SIMIC
Dime-Store Alchemy
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.
AMY LOWELL
preface, Tendencies in Modern Poetry
Poetry is indispensable -- if I only knew what for.
JEAN COCTEAU
attributed, The Necessity of Art
Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
T. S. ELIOT
Tradition and the Individual Talent
In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.
J.M. COETZEE
Disgrace
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