POETRY QUOTES X

quotations about poetry

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

Tags: Federico Garcia Lorca


Once I started writing all the time and interacting with poets, I made a conscious decision to identify myself as a poet. It's funny how much a single word can provide focus and direction. As soon as I claimed that identity, I started clearing more and more space for poetry in my life and applying poetic tools to other areas of my life. The world became a different place, and I witnessed it through different kinds of eyes.

TRACY K. SMITH

interview, Gulf Coast, vol. 17, number 1

Tags: Tracy K. Smith


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


Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

J. D. SALINGER

"Teddy"

Tags: J. D. Salinger


Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering--I mean remembering in words--what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives.

MARY OLIVER

A Poetry Handbook

Tags: Mary Oliver


No one ever expects poetry to sell.

ALAN LIGHTMAN

interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000

Tags: Alan Lightman


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

Tags: Alfred Austin


Then one can't make a living out of poetry?
Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.

JACK LONDON

Martin Eden

Tags: Jack London


I urge every one, every now and again at least, to lay down the novel and open the poem: but let it be a poem that will enlarge one's conception of life, that will help one to think loftily, and to feel nobly, will teach us that there is something more important to ourselves even than ourselves, something more important and deserving of attention than one's own small griefs and own petty woes, the vast and varied drama of History, the boundless realm of the human imagination, and the tragic interests and pathetic struggles of mankind.

ALFRED AUSTIN

The Bridling of Pegasus

Tags: Alfred Austin


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

Tags: T. S. Eliot


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


For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.

WYNDHAM LEWIS

Tarr

Tags: Wyndham Lewis


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

Tags: Alfred Austin


Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.

LOUIS ARAGON

Treatise on Style

Tags: Louis Aragon


Poets' food is love and fame.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

"An Exhortation"

Tags: Percy Bysshe Shelley


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

Tags: Mary Oliver


Poetry, indeed, has always been one of humanity's sharpest tools for puncturing the shrink-wrap of silence and oppression.

MARIA POPOVA

"Poetry as Protest and Sanctuary", brainpickings, April 18, 2017


It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one's eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

"Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III", L'art romantique

Tags: Charles Baudelaire


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

Tags: Seamus Heaney


For a genre of literature that is supposedly dead, poetry provides some of the most quoted material in the history of quotes.

STAFF EDITORIAL

The Nevada Sagebrush, April 12, 2016