“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVII
Context: Who shall compose the Bible of human desire, the terrible and simple Bible of that which drives us from life to life, the Bible of our doings, our goings, our original fall? Who will dare to tell everything, who will have the genius to see everything?
I believe in a lofty form of poetry, in the work in which beauty will be mingled with beliefs. The more incapable of it I feel myself, the more I believe it to be possible. The sad splendour with which certain memories of mine overwhelm me, shows me that it is possible. Sometimes I myself have been sublime, I myself have been a masterpiece. Sometimes my visions have been mingled with a thrill of evidence so strong and so creative that the whole room has quivered with it like a forest, and there have been moments, in truth, when the silence cried out.
But I have stolen all this, and I have profited by it, thanks to the shamelessness of the truth revealed. At the point in space in which, by accident, I found myself, I had only to open my eyes and to stretch out my mendicant hands to accomplish more than a dream, to accomplish almost a work.

Source: The Art of Racing in the Rain

The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)

Starck as cited in: David Barlex (2007) Design & technology. p. 33

A Treatise on Painting (1651); "The Paragone"; compiled by Francesco Melzi prior to 1542, first published as Trattato della pittura by Raffaelo du Fresne (1651)
Context: Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen. These two arts, you may call them both either poetry or painting, have here interchanged the senses by which they penetrate to the intellect.

'Poetry' September 1995

Crudel, che tal beltà turba e consuma.
Canto IV, stanza 77 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)