quotations about poetry
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
Poems do seem to want to announce, over and over, that life's warm zephyrs are blowing past and the gravestones are just beyond the next rise. Little groupings of gravestones, all leaning and cracked, with a rusty black Victorian fence around them. They're just over that rise. Poets never want to forget that. And actually we need to hear that sometimes.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs -- no regular hours, so many temptations!
ELIZABETH BISHOP
One Art: Letters
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
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
Poetry is pretty much everywhere: bubbling in the broken coffee machine, creeping through the cold-calls, boasting in the empty bank balance. Poetry is disconcerting and at best dangerous, lurking in that deep-stomach lurch when you lean too close to the platform edge.
JADE CUTTLE
"A plate of poetry, please: Is poetry more important than politics?", Varsity Online, May 3, 2016
A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests.
JOHN DRYDEN
Fables, Ancient and Modern
Writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, November 6, 1937
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
T. S. ELIOT
The Sacred Wood
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
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"
Then one can't make a living out of poetry?
Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.
JACK LONDON
Martin Eden
The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.
J. D. SALINGER
"Seymour: An Introduction"
No one ever expects poetry to sell.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
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
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
The worst slam poetry is just banal prose with peculiar line breaks, syllable counting gurning and mime hands. Noble social protest is lost beneath all the posturing self-aggrandisement, faux patois and, ironically "keeping it real". The best Slam poets -- the really good ones who get toured around and awarded residencies even though they rarely, if ever, compete anymore and less often publish -- are genuinely brilliant, cut from the same cloth as the best stand-up comedians and character actors, but are still largely performing dramatic monologues.
ANDREW PAUL WOOD
"Slam poetry is despicable and dumb-ass and not good", The Spinoff, April 27, 2016
Poetry as religion -- I'll drink to that! For me it is a sacred vocation, and one that no one can take away from me. One is a witch in community, one has a job title conferred by an employer: but one can be a poet without approval or sanction from anyone else. Even a child writing their first poems may call themselves a poet. I love that.
YVONNE ABURROW
"On Poetry: A Conversation", Patheos, April 30, 2016
No really sensible person ever remembers enough poetry to recite it.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
If the poet would avoid pepsis in his patients, his scalpel must be as clean as the surgeon's.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought