quotations about poetry
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
Debate doesn't really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope.... That's something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.
SEAMUS HEANEY
Paris Review, Fall 1997
Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs -- no regular hours, so many temptations!
ELIZABETH BISHOP
One Art: Letters
Then one can't make a living out of poetry?
Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.
JACK LONDON
Martin Eden
All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
No one ever expects poetry to sell.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
No really sensible person ever remembers enough poetry to recite it.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
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
The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.
J. D. SALINGER
"Seymour: An Introduction"
Poets' food is love and fame.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"An Exhortation"
Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral; and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans, especially, have patronized this happy idea; and we Bostonians, very especially have developed it in full. We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true Poetic dignity and force; but the simple fact is, that, would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls, we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem--this poem per se--this poem which is a poem and nothing more--this poem written solely for the poem's sake.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Poetic Principle"
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
Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.
CHARLES DICKENS
The Pickwick Papers
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
For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Pericles and Aspasia
Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck,
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck.
JOHN DRYDEN
Abaslom and Achitophel
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
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory.
JAMES JOYCE
a lecture on James Clarence Mangan delivered at the Literary and Historical Society, University College, Dublin, February 1, 1902
I want to be a poet, from head to toe, living and dying by poetry.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
letter to Melchor Fernandez Almagro, February 1926