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
The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
On Translating Homer
There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.
EDWARD HIRSCH
interview, 2007
We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Poetry"
You speak
As one who fed on poetry.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Richelieu
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
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
Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.
CHARLES SIMIC
The Unemployed Fortune-Teller
Poetry is art, but poetry contests are sport, bound by rules as exacting as any that govern collegiate competition.
ZUSHA ELINSON
"Poetry Is Art, but Poetry Slams Are Sport, Bound by Pages of Rules", Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2016
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
PLATO
Ion
I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
The Atlantic Online, September 18, 1997
I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don't know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren't bothered by each other.
T. S. ELIOT
The Paris Review, spring-summer 1959
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
Poetry is God's work.
KATY LEDERER
"An Interview with Katy Lederer", Thermos Magazine, January 21, 2010
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
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
The crown of literature is poetry.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Essays in Criticism, Second Series
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
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
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