quotations about poetry
Poets are the chemists of sentiment, for they analyze and purify it.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry
Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666
Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We're involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We're always going to need it.
EDWARD HIRSCH
interview, 2007
The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
On Translating Homer
Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity.
AMY LOWELL
preface, Tendencies in Modern Poetry
We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Poetry"
Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
attributed, An Introduction to Poetry and Criticism
It tells us a great deal about a man to know that he chooses as his form of expression the poetic medium. It tells us, I think, something about his system of ontology. The composition of poetry is evidence that for him values have a reality, and he is capable of emotion upon the subject of value. The entire corpus of the world's poetry rests upon a theory of universal analogy which teaches that all phenomena in some degree resemble each other. There is a minimal truth in even the wildest metaphor simply because the world is, from one point of view, a unitary thing.
RICHARD WEAVER
"Agrarianism in Exile"
'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
You'll find yourself going back to certain poems again and again. After all, they are only words on a page, but you go back because something that really matters to you is evoked in you by the words. And if somebody said to you, Well, what is it? or What do your favorite poems mean?, you may well be able to answer it, if you've been educated in a certain way, but I think you'll feel the gap between what you are able to say and why you go on reading.
ADAM PHILLIPS
The Paris Review, spring 2014
A poet hurts himself by writing prose; as a racehorse hurts his motion by condescending to draw a team.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners
The permanent passions of mankind--love, religion, patriotism, humanitarianism, hate, revenge, ambition; the conflict between free will and fate; the rise and fall of empires--these are all great themes, and, if greatly treated, and in accordance with the essentials applicable to all poetry, may produce poetry of the loftiest kind.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Poetry is another way of encouraging people to think and feel deeply about their own lives and their relationships to other people and other communities.
HANNAH ENSOR
"Poetry to fill the air at weekend festival", Tucson Sentinel, April 14, 2016
No doubt Plato's notion that poets should chant nothing but hymns to the Gods and praises of virtue is a little narrow and exacting, but if they are to sing songs worthy of themselves, and of mankind, they must be on the side of virtue and of the Gods.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Some poems are like the Centaurs--a mingling of man and beast, and begotten of Ixion on a cloud.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013
The crown of literature is poetry.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Essays in Criticism, Second Series
So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos