“The greatest poets never write poetry. The Homers and Shakespeares are not the greatest — they are only the greatest that we can know. And so with Handel among musicians. For the highest poetry, whether in music or literature, is ineffable — it must be felt from one person to another, it cannot be articulated.”

Poetry
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XII - The Enfant Terrible of Literature

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Samuel Butler232

novelist 1835–1902

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“Poetry is the greatest literature, and pleasure in poetry is the greatest of literary pleasures. It is also the least easy to attain and there are some people who never do attain it.”

Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon (1862–1933) British Liberal statesman

Recreation (1919)

“Blok was probably the greatest Russian poet since Pushkin; although internationally less well known than Rilke and Valéry, he is of their stature and importance. He revolutionized Russian versification by making use of a purely accentual technique. He knew, as so few now know, that only the poetry of suffering – whether it is a poetry of joy or not – can be great. His own poetry, for which he burnt himself out, demonstrates this.”

Alexander Blok (1880–1921) poet

Martin Seymour-Smith Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975) vol. 4, p. 225.
Criticism

“What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe”

James Dickey (1923–1997) American writer

“Shakespeare’s fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste.”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

On Dramatic Poetry (1758)

“Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

At an interview with Stephen Colbert at Montclair Kimberley Academy on January 29th, 2010.
2010s

“Stevens’s poetry makes one understand how valuable it can be for a poet to write a great deal. Not too much of that great deal, ever, is good poetry; but out of quantity can come practice, naturalness, accustomed mastery, adaptations and elaborations and reversals of old ways, new ways, even—so that the poet can put into the poems, at the end of a lifetime, what the end of a lifetime brings him. Stevens has learned to write at will, for pleasure; his methods of writing, his ways of imagining, have made this possible for him as it is impossible for many living poets—Eliot, for instance. Anything can be looked at, felt about, meditated upon, so Stevens can write about anything; he does not demand of his poems the greatest concentration, intensity, dramatic immediacy, the shattering and inexplicable rightness the poet calls inspiration.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p. 65
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job…. Poetry.. remains one person talking to another…. no poet can write a poem of amplitude unless he is the master of the prosaic.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

The Music of Poetry (24 February 1942) the third W. P. Ker memorial lecture delivered in the University of Glasgow

“The greatest of the Minnesinger, all of whom he surpasses both in the range and in the humanity of his poetry.”

Walther von der Vogelweide (1170–1230) Middle High German lyric poet

A. T. Hatto, in Gottfried von Strassburg (trans. A. T. Hatto) Tristan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975) p. 368.
Praise

“The arrogance of poets is only a defense; doubt gnaws the greatest among them; they need our testimony to escape despair.”

Francois Mauriac (1885–1970) French author

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