POETRY QUOTES VII

quotations about 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


Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

W. H. AUDEN

New Year Letter

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Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.

CHARLES SIMIC

Dime-Store Alchemy

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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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For verses and poems I can turn to true food.

ST. AUGUSTINE

Confessions

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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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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

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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

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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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Good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it.

UMBERTO ECO

The Paris Review, summer 2008

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My poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

PABLO NERUDA

Memoirs

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Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

ADRIENNE RICH

attributed, Unlocking the Poem

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Certain events such as love, or a national calamity, or May, bring pressure to bear on the individual, and if the pressure is strong enough, something in the form of verse is bound to be squeezed out.

JOHN STEINBECK

The Paris Review, fall 1975

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Poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

MARY OLIVER

A Poetry Handbook

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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

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Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you--like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist--or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

letter to "Scottie" Fitzgerald, August 3, 1940

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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

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

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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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

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