“Any form of orthodoxy is just not part of a poet's province … A poet must be able to claim … freedom to follow the vision of poetry, the imaginative vision of poetry … And in any case, poetry is religion, religion is poetry.”

— R.S. Thomas

R. S. Thomas : Priest and Poet, BBC TV (2 April 1972)
Context: Any form of orthodoxy is just not part of a poet's province … A poet must be able to claim … freedom to follow the vision of poetry, the imaginative vision of poetry … And in any case, poetry is religion, religion is poetry. The message of the New Testament is poetry. Christ was a poet, the New Testament is metaphor, the Resurrection is a metaphor; and I feel perfectly within my rights in approaching my whole vocation as priest and preacher as one who is to present poetry; and when I preach poetry I am preaching Christianity, and when one discusses Christianity one is discussing poetry in its imaginative aspects. … My work as a poet has to deal with the presentation of imaginative truth.

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R.S. Thomas58

Welsh poet 1913–2000

Dennis O'Driscoll (1954–2012) Irish poet, critic

Poetry Quotes

“My life's purpose is to write poetry — but behind the poetry must be the vision of a fresh revelation for men.”

William Soutar (1898–1943) British poet

Diary, 29th August 1932.
Quotation posted with the permission of the National Scottish Library, Edinburgh, Scotland.

“He who writes poetry is not a poet. He whose poetry has become his life, and who has made his life his poetry — it is he who is a poet.”

Subramanya Bharathi (1882–1921) Tamil poet

English translation originally from "Subramaniya Bharathi" at Tamilnation.org, also quoted in "Colliding worlds of tradition and revolution" in The Hindu (13 December 2009) http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/colliding-worlds-of-tradition-and-revolution/article662079.ece

“Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor… the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

Selected Prose (1995), p. 131

“He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.”

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Source: Arcadia

“I know what his poetry will be about. What poetry is always about. The cruelty of the poet's mistress.”

Martin Amis book London Fields

London Fields (1989)

“If poets spoke their poetry, they would not need to write it.”

Dennis O'Driscoll (1954–2012) Irish poet, critic

Poetry Quotes

“Who wants to understand the poem
Must go to the land of poetry;
Who wishes to understand the poet
Must go to the poet's land.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

West-östlicher Diwan, motto (1819)

“The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

“As part of the spring ritual of National Poetry Month, poets are symbolically dragged into the public square in order to be humiliated with the claim that their product has not achieved sufficient market penetration and must be revived by the Artificial Resuscitation Foundation (ARF) lest the art form collapse from its own incompetence, irrelevance, and as a result of the general disinterest among the broad masses of the American People. The motto of ARF's National Poetry Month is: "Poetry's not so bad, really."”

Charles Bernstein (1950) American writer

" Against National Poetry Month As Such http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/044106.html", from My Way: Speeches and Poems, 1999, University Of Chicago Press, ISBN 0226044092

“Any form of orthodoxy is just not part of a poet's province … A poet must be able to claim … freedom to follow the vision of poetry, the imaginative vision of poetry … And in any case, poetry is religion, religion is poetry.”

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