quotations about poetry
Where you find poems in most people's lives is at weddings and at funerals. Poems are turned to in the great transitions of a life, when we are at sea amid changes too vast to feel in any way the master of. One of the things poems do is demonstrate that you aren't alone -- that other humans have been here before, and have found a way to sustain aliveness, to find beauty within the condition of grief. And this allows you to go on.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"How can poems transform the world? A chat with poet Jane Hirshfield.", Washington Post, May 13, 2015
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
Because I fell in love with poetry, my mother sighed and said that I was doomed to work at a cosmetics factory, naming lipsticks.
GWEN HART
"The Empress of Kisses"
Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity.
AMY LOWELL
preface, Tendencies in Modern Poetry
True poetry is not of earth,
'T is more of Heaven by its birth.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
"Parnassus", Cloudrifts at Twilight
When people say that poetry is merely a luxury for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read much at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language -- and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers -- a language powerful enough to say how it is.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Guardian, November 14, 2008
You'll find yourself going back to certain poems again and again. After all, they are only words on a page, but you go back because something that really matters to you is evoked in you by the words. And if somebody said to you, Well, what is it? or What do your favorite poems mean?, you may well be able to answer it, if you've been educated in a certain way, but I think you'll feel the gap between what you are able to say and why you go on reading.
ADAM PHILLIPS
The Paris Review, spring 2014
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. AUDEN
"Squares and Oblongs", Poets at Work
The crown of literature is poetry.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Essays in Criticism, Second Series
You speak
As one who fed on poetry.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Richelieu
Poets are the chemists of sentiment, for they analyze and purify it.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry
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
A poet hurts himself by writing prose; as a racehorse hurts his motion by condescending to draw a team.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners
Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
attributed, An Introduction to Poetry and Criticism
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
One of the current great problems in the world is fundamentalism of every kind -- political, spiritual -- and poetry is an antidote to fundamentalism. Poetry is about the clarities that you find when you don't simplify. Poetry is about complexity, nuance, subtlety. Poems also create larger fields of possibility. The imagination is limitless, so even when a person is confronted with an unchangeable outer circumstance, one thing poems give you is the sense that there's always, still, a changeability, a malleability, of inner circumstance. That's the beginning of freedom.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"How can poems transform the world? A chat with poet Jane Hirshfield.", Washington Post, May 13, 2015
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
So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
The permanent passions of mankind--love, religion, patriotism, humanitarianism, hate, revenge, ambition; the conflict between free will and fate; the rise and fall of empires--these are all great themes, and, if greatly treated, and in accordance with the essentials applicable to all poetry, may produce poetry of the loftiest kind.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus