quotations about poetry
No one ever expects poetry to sell.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T. S. ELIOT
"Dante"
All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.
J. D. SALINGER
"Seymour: An Introduction"
Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Philosophy of Composition"
Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Pericles and Aspasia
Poetry can be a really great outlet for kids and teens. There are so many rules when you're a teen, but writing poetry is totally open-ended. It's a great way for kids and teens to talk about their feelings and what's going on with no rules. Whatever comes out, comes out.
ELISSA DICKSON
"Elissa Dickson is new San Miguel County Poet Laureate", The Daily Planet, May 4, 2016
Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
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
Poems want to awaken intimacy, connection, expansion, and wildness.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
interview, Words with Writers, December 5, 2011
For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.
CHARLES DICKENS
The Pickwick Papers
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
The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds
Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;
But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,
He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"The Albotross"
Out on the foolish phrase, but there's a hard rhyming without it.
ROBERT BROWNING
letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 26, 1845
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
Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
MARY OLIVER
A Poetry Handbook
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
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
Then one can't make a living out of poetry?
Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.
JACK LONDON
Martin Eden