quotations about poetry
Some poems are like the Centaurs--a mingling of man and beast, and begotten of Ixion on a cloud.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and wisely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Heinrich Heine", Essays in Criticism, First Series
There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.
EDWARD HIRSCH
interview, 2007
Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We're involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We're always going to need it.
EDWARD HIRSCH
interview, 2007
None knows the reason why this curse
Was sent on him, this love of making verse.
HORACE
Ars Poetica
You speak
As one who fed on poetry.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Richelieu
I string sounds together. But to string them I have to remember a bunch of old ones I heard somewhere and then juggle them into a new rhythm and shape.
FRANK LOESSER
letter to Angel Steinbeck, A Most Remarkable Fella: Frank Loesser and the Guys and Dolls in His Life
From my earliest sense of self, I knew that I would be--should be--a poet. It was not as if I had a choice; more like the dying beauty all about breathed its last breath in me and commanded that I be doomed to play with words the rest of my days.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the Polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.
JOHN KEATS
letter to Benjamin Bailey, October 8, 1817
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
A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.
MARGARET ATWOOD
On Writing Poetry
I approach poetry and spirituality like literary nitroglycerin -- a little can do a lot and you better damn well be careful with it.
CRAIG JOHNSON
"A Conversation with Craig Johnson", The Cold Dish
Poetry is God's work.
KATY LEDERER
"An Interview with Katy Lederer", Thermos Magazine, January 21, 2010
If you can't be a bad poet at seventeen, with your brother dying just down the corridor, what hope is there for poetry?
BERNARD BECKETT
Lullaby
No wonder poets sometimes have to seem
So much more businesslike than businessmen.
Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.
ROBERT FROST
"New Hampshire"
The crown of literature is poetry.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Essays in Criticism, Second Series
When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
W. H. AUDEN
New Year Letter
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Anima Hominis", Per Amica Silentia Lunae
Is poetry more important than politics? In a practical sense, probably not, but people have different perspectives and will place their values accordingly. I know I couldn't munch through metaphors if I was half-starved and shivering on the streets - though I'd probably give it a go. Still, as someone pointed out, a brew does taste better with a spoonful of sugar and a splash of semi-skimmed than with a dash of Dylan Thomas.
JADE CUTTLE
"A plate of poetry, please: Is poetry more important than politics?", Varsity Online, May 3, 2016