“All poets face the same task to 'follow the prompts' and satisfactorily shape the amorphous sounds, rhythms, images or phrases by which a potential poem is recognised.”

—  Dennis O'Driscoll

Poetry Quotes

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Dennis O'Driscoll photo
Dennis O'Driscoll 30
Irish poet, critic 1954–2012

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T. E. Hulme (1883–1917) English Imagist poet and critic

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“Thoughts in a poem. The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

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“The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”

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

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“Emerson writes in his Journal that all men try their hands at poetry, but few know which their poems are. The poets are not those who write poems, but those who know which of the things they write are poems.”

Carl Andre (1935) American artist

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“Just as counterpoint and harmony follow their own laws, and differ in rhythm and movement, both formal tensions and color tensions have a development of their own in accordance with the inherent laws from which they are separately derived. Both, however, aim toward the realization of the same image. And both deal with the depth problem.”

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“A certain ambiguity of rhythm is one of the beauties of a poem”

Anne Ridler (1912–2001) English poet, editor

The Anatomy of Poetry, Marjoie Boulton, Routledge & Kegan, London 1953.

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“The composer (organizer of sound) will be faced not only with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time. The 'frame' or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will probably be the basic unit in the measurement of time. No rhythm will be beyond the composer's reach.
NEW METHODS WILL BE DISCOVERED, BEARING A DEFINITE RELATION TO SCHOENBERG'S TWELVE-TONE SYSTEM”

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Source: 'The Future of Music: Credo' (1937); in: 'Silence: lectures and writings by Cage, John', Publisher Middletown, Conn. Wesleyan University Press, June 1961, 4/SILENCE

“The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it.”

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

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Context: People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to answer, For whom do you do good? Are you kind to your daughter because in the end someone will pay you for being?... The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it.

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