POETRY QUOTES VIII

quotations about poetry

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

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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

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Poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

"The Town"

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Poetry is the music of the soul, and above all, of great and feeling souls.

ELIZA COOK

Diamond Dust

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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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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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Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

"The Divine Comedy"

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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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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

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Poets' food is love and fame.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

"An Exhortation"

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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

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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

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All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Louis Lambert

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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

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No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.

T. S. ELIOT

The Music of Poetry

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I'm a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

The Paris Review, fall 1981

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Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.

ANTONIN ARTAUD

"The Theatre of Cruelty" (Second Manifesto), The Theater and Its Double

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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

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Poetry is indispensable -- if I only knew what for.

JEAN COCTEAU

attributed, The Necessity of Art

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If Poetry comes not as naturally as Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

JOHN KEATS

letter to John Taylor, February 27, 1818

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