“Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps it’s the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic—makes it poetry.”
The Paris Review interview
Context: Goethe called his work one big confession, didn’t he? Looking at his work in the broadest sense, you could say the same of Shakespeare: a total self-examination and self-accusation, a total confession—very naked, I think, when you look into it. Maybe it’s the same with any writing that has real poetic life. Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps it’s the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic—makes it poetry. The writer daren’t actually put it into words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies. We think we’re writing something to amuse, but we’re actually saying something we desperately need to share.
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Ted Hughes 55
English poet and children's writer 1930–1998Related quotes

12
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

“Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow.”
Preface
The Marble Faun (1860)
Context: No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, before romance writers may find congenial and easily handled themes, either in the annals of our stalwart republic, or in any characteristic and probable events of our individual lives. Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow.

Source: Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time (1975), p. v
“Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught.”
Source: Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue

A Defence of Poetry http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html (1821)

“I have nothing to say/ and I am saying it/ and that is poetry/ as I need it.”
"Lecture on Nothing" (1949)
1940s
"The Promise of Words" in London Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 17, p. 23