quotations about poetry
O gracious God! how far have we
Profaned thy heavenly gift of poesy!
JOHN DRYDEN
To the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killegrew
Moving through decades of carefully selected writing changes us; it reminds us that poetry is a form of activism and that language can shift our experience and understanding of the world, can do something beyond the page.
ERICA KAUFMAN
"The End of Gender", Boston Review, May 4, 2016
I string sounds together. But to string them I have to remember a bunch of old ones I heard somewhere and then juggle them into a new rhythm and shape.
FRANK LOESSER
letter to Angel Steinbeck, A Most Remarkable Fella: Frank Loesser and the Guys and Dolls in His Life
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
There is no true poet in whom fancy is not close akin to faith.
JOHN C. BAILEY
The Claims of French Poetry
The emperor would prefer the poet to keep away from politics, the emperor's domain, so that he can manage things the way he likes.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Conjunctions, Fall 1991
Some people pretend they never were in love and never wrote poetry; two weaknesses which they dare not own -- one of the heart, the other of the mind.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères
Poetry is God's work.
KATY LEDERER
"An Interview with Katy Lederer", Thermos Magazine, January 21, 2010
Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World
No wonder poets sometimes have to seem
So much more businesslike than businessmen.
Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.
ROBERT FROST
"New Hampshire"
I approach poetry and spirituality like literary nitroglycerin -- a little can do a lot and you better damn well be careful with it.
CRAIG JOHNSON
"A Conversation with Craig Johnson", The Cold Dish
Away! away! I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy.
JOHN KEATS
"Ode to a Nightingale"
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
JEAN COCTEAU
"Le Secret Professionnel", A Call to Order
The poem that says "I love you" is the little black cocktail dress, the classic thing that everyone would like to have written one of.
JAMES FENTON
BBC Radio, October 4, 1994
Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.
CHARLES SIMIC
The Unemployed Fortune-Teller
I think that believing in language -- in the ability of words to bring even an imagined reality into being -- is a big part of what it means to write poetry. If something like an idea or a belief is capable of being imagined or even described, then the possibility that it will be acted upon becomes much more likely. I think that many of my poems are attempts to take myself up on that premise, to step into conversation with voices and events that require me to decide something: what do I believe is right? What is the more subtle or subjective view of this situation? What must I challenge myself to understand?
TRACY K. SMITH
interview, Ploughshares Literary Magazine, May 30, 2012
I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
The Atlantic Online, September 18, 1997
For verses and poems I can turn to true food.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
OSCAR WILDE
"The Children of the Poets", Pall Mall Gazette, October 14, 1886
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