quotations about poetry
No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.
T. S. ELIOT
The Music of Poetry
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"
Out on the foolish phrase, but there's a hard rhyming without it.
ROBERT BROWNING
letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 26, 1845
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"
All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
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
If Poetry comes not as naturally as Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
JOHN KEATS
letter to John Taylor, February 27, 1818
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
Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
MARY OLIVER
A Poetry Handbook
Poets' food is love and fame.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"An Exhortation"
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
No one ever expects poetry to sell.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
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
Poetry is indispensable -- if I only knew what for.
JEAN COCTEAU
attributed, The Necessity of Art
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
The most generous critic, if he is to be discriminating and just, cannot, let me say again, allow that any verse which is profoundly obscure or utterly unmusical, no matter how intellectual in substance, deserves the appellation of poetry.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
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"
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
Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs -- no regular hours, so many temptations!
ELIZABETH BISHOP
One Art: Letters