POETRY QUOTES
quotations about poetry
The poem ... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see -- it is, rather, a light by which we may see -- and what we see is life.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
Saturday Review, March 22, 1958
And then there is, of course, always, and inevitably, this spume of poetry that's just blowing out of the sulphurous flue-holes of the earth. Just masses of poetry. It's unstoppable, it's uncorkable. There's no way to make it end. If we could just--just stop. For one year. If everybody could stop publishing their poems. No more. Stop it. Just--everyone. Every poet. Just stop. But of course that's totally unfair to the poets who are just starting out.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
If after I read a poem, the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so, I'm sure it's a good one.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
One Art: Letters
Poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects--love, death, war.
JAMES FENTON
The New Yorker, July 25, 1994
Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY
The Redress of Poetry
Poetry gives us permission. It reminds us that we are loved and we are human. Its rhythms are those of the heartbeat. Its rhymes lure us into remembering more than we ever imagine. It's a form of song, with a quieter tune.
MOLLY FISK
"Poetry Is All Yours", Women's Voices for Change, April 9, 2016
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
PABLO NERUDA
"Tonight I Can Write"
Poetry is an orphan of silence.
CHARLES SIMIC
attributed, Stealing Glimpses: Of Poetry, Poets, and Things in Between
What's poetry? It's not real but maybe it's more than real. It's dreaming while you're awake.
CARYL CHURCHILL
A Dream Play
Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.
GAO XINGJIAN
The Other Shore
There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
JOHN ASHBERY
International Herald Tribune, October 2, 1989
Mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by either men, or gods, or booksellers.
HORACE
Ars Poetica
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
ROBERT FROST
attributed, Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence
All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they will never give the inner meaning of the original.
HENRI BERGSON
The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics
I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY
This Week, April 15, 2004
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
EMILY DICKINSON
letter to T. W. Higginson, c. 1870
True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.
GASTON BACHELARD
introduction, Water and Dreams
Not to be too dogmatic, I don't believe there is anything such thing as free verse, as long as the poet is using language, the poet can't break enough rules to escape and still be understood.
WALTER BARGEN
interview, Cavalier Literary Couture
Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it--indeed the world's need of it--these never pass.
MARY OLIVER
A Poetry Handbook
Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.
MAX BEERBOHM
And Even Now