quotations about poetry
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
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A Defence of Poetry
Joyous or bereaved, poetry is the ink and paper realm of emotion.
MAGGIE GRIMASON
"The Province of the Heart", Alibi, April 28, 2016
My poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
PABLO NERUDA
Memoirs
Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
Introduction to Aesthetics
A poem sings with a bad accent in any language not its own.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
W. H. AUDEN
New Year Letter
A poet is a painter in his way, he draws to the life, but in another kind; we draw the nobler part, the soul and the mind; the pictures of the pen shall outlast those of the pencil, and even worlds themselves.
APHRA BEHN
Oroonoko
I don't think good poetry can be produced in a kind of political attempt to overthrow some existing form. I think it just supersedes. People find a way in which they can say something. "I can't say it that way, what way can I find that will do?"
T. S. ELIOT
The Paris Review, spring-summer 1959
Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you--like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist--or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
letter to "Scottie" Fitzgerald, August 3, 1940
Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
letter to Ellen O'Leary, February 3, 1889
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
OSCAR WILDE
"The Children of the Poets", Pall Mall Gazette, October 14, 1886
Good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it.
UMBERTO ECO
The Paris Review, summer 2008
You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
JOHN ADAMS
letter to John Quincy Adams, May 14, 1781
A true poet comes among us only once in a generation, sometimes not once in a century, and ... certain civilized nations never produce a great poet. We suffer from dearth of poets, not from lack of love for poetry.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damages.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
The Fall of the Towers
Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Divine Comedy"
Poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
MARY OLIVER
A Poetry Handbook
A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests.
JOHN DRYDEN
Fables, Ancient and Modern
As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Rain Taxi, winter 2000/2001
Poets are the most injurious romancers by which society is deluded; for they excite the feelings or the imagination to such an extent--creating superhuman excellences--that the dull realities of life, its frauds, its meanness, its falsehood, or even its truth, alike sicken and disgust.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos