quotations about poetry
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
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Memoirs
Poetry is God's work.
KATY LEDERER
"An Interview with Katy Lederer", Thermos Magazine, January 21, 2010
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
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
W. H. AUDEN
New Year Letter
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
OSCAR WILDE
"The Children of the Poets", Pall Mall Gazette, October 14, 1886
A poem sings with a bad accent in any language not its own.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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 the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
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
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 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
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
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"
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
Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
"The Theatre of Cruelty" (Second Manifesto), The Theater and Its Double
The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.
HERBERT SPENCER
The Philosophy of Style
Poesy is a part of learning in measure of words, for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination; which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things.
FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning