POETRY QUOTES IX

quotations about poetry

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

ELIZA COOK

Diamond Dust

Tags: Eliza Cook


The poet is the man that sings,
That plays upon the harp's wild strings,
That reads the tale of starry skies,
That soars aloft on seraph's wings.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN FIELD

"Poetry"

Tags: Benjamin Franklin Field


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

T. S. ELIOT

The Music of Poetry

Tags: T. S. Eliot


A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests.

JOHN DRYDEN

Fables, Ancient and Modern

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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"

Tags: Charles Baudelaire


Sometimes when a prose poem is floundering, I rewrite it as verse, and it's better in that form. The reverse process of verse into prose poem, also works to clarify what's working in the writing and what's not. It's not a blunt line that demarcates the difference between verse and the prose poem.

WALTER BARGEN

"An interview with Walter Bargen, first poet laureate of Missouri"

Tags: Walter Bargen


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


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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Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

A Defence of Poetry

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Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

J. D. SALINGER

"Teddy"

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Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.

LOUIS ARAGON

Treatise on Style

Tags: Louis Aragon


It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

T. S. ELIOT

Tradition and the Individual Talent

Tags: T. S. Eliot


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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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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You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.

NICHOLSON BAKER

The Anthologist

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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

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Poetry has the power to turn words into darts that shoot under your skin.

PENNY ASHTON

"Poetry Idol's organiser is shocked and saddened to learn that slam poetry is 'dumb-ass and not good'", The Spinoff, April 28, 2016


There's no preparation for poetry. Four years of grave digging with a nice volume of poetry or a book of philosophy in one's pocket would serve as well as any university.

CHARLES SIMIC

The Paris Review, spring 2005

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Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

ARISTOTLE

Poetics

Tags: Aristotle


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

Tags: Seamus Heaney