POETRY QUOTES X

quotations about poetry

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

Tags: Jean Cocteau


Poets are the most injurious romancers by which society is deluded; for they excite the feelings or the imagination to such an extent--creating superhuman excellences--that the dull realities of life, its frauds, its meanness, its falsehood, or even its truth, alike sicken and disgust.

CHARLES WILLIAM DAY

The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos

Tags: Charles William Day


Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.

CHARLES DICKENS

The Pickwick Papers

Tags: Charles Dickens


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


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

Tags: Austin O'Malley


Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs -- no regular hours, so many temptations!

ELIZABETH BISHOP

One Art: Letters

Tags: Elizabeth Bishop


You have to write a poem the way you ride a horse--you have to know what to do with it. You have to be in charge of a horse or it will eat all day--you'll never get back to the barn. But if you tell the horse how to be a horse, if you force it, the horse will probably break a leg. The horse and rider have to be together.

JACK GILBERT

The Paris Review, fall/winter 2005

Tags: Jack Gilbert


Whenever I read a poem that moves me, I know I'm not alone in the world. I feel a connection to the person who wrote it, knowing that he or she has gone through something similar to what I've experienced, or felt something like what I have felt. And their poem gives me hope and courage, because I know that they survived, that their life force was strong enough to turn experience into words and shape it into meaning and then bring it toward me to share.

GREGORY ORR

All Things Considered, February 20, 2006

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Though my verse but roam the air
And murmur in the trees,
You may discern a purpose there,
As in music of the bees.

ALFRED AUSTIN

"A Birthday", Lyrical Poems

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There's no preparation for poetry. Four years of grave digging with a nice volume of poetry or a book of philosophy in one's pocket would serve as well as any university.

CHARLES SIMIC

The Paris Review, spring 2005

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There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Tags: Charles Bukowski


There is a widespread notion in the public mind that poetic inspiration has something mysterious and translunar about it, something which altogether escapes human analysis, which it would be almost sacrilege for analysis to touch. The Romans spoke of the poet's divine afflatus, the Elizabethans of his fine frenzy. And even in our own day critics, and poets themselves, are not lacking who take the affair quite as seriously. Our critics and poets are themselves largely responsible for this -- they are a sentimental lot, even when most discerning, and cannot help indulging, on the one hand, in a reverential attitude toward the art, and, on the other, in a reverential attitude toward themselves.

CONRAD AIKEN

Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry

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The object of linguistics is language; that of poetics is concrete utterance. Language is an institution, a formal system which constitutes, for the hypothetical speaker, a "competence"; it is a virtual object. Speech (the poetic utterance, for our purposes) is an individual act which formulates a concrete discourse; it is a "performance".

ANNA BALAKIAN

The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages

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Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck,
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck.

JOHN DRYDEN

Abaslom and Achitophel

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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

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Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

J. D. SALINGER

"Teddy"

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Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering--I mean remembering in words--what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives.

MARY OLIVER

A Poetry Handbook

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No really sensible person ever remembers enough poetry to recite it.

EDGAR WATSON HOWE

Country Town Sayings

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Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

T. S. ELIOT

The Sacred Wood

Tags: T. S. Eliot


For a genre of literature that is supposedly dead, poetry provides some of the most quoted material in the history of quotes.

STAFF EDITORIAL

The Nevada Sagebrush, April 12, 2016