“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

— movie Dead Poets Society

1989

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Tom Schulman (1950) American film director, screenwriter

Source: Dead Poets Society

“When I originally started writing, I expected that probably very few people would read my poetry because in those days people didn’t read poetry much anyway.”

John Ashbery (1927–2017) poet from the United States

Source: Paris Review Interview (1983)

“Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.”

Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) German philosopher

Sämtliche Werken, ed. Josef Nadler (Vienna: Verlag Herder, 1949-1957), vol. II, p. 197.

“Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.”

Pat Conroy book The Prince of Tides

Source: The Prince of Tides, character Henry Wingo, chapter 2, page 53 (e-book edition)

“Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.”

Bashō Matsuo (1644–1694) Japanese poet

“Poetry Fetter'd. Fetters the Human Race. Nations are Destroy'd, or Flourish, in proportion as Their Poetry, Painting, and Music are Destroy'd or Flourish!”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

To the Public, plate 3 (the last paragraph)
1800s, Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion (c. 1803–1820)

“What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

Interview with Donald Hall in November 1960, pub.'Paris Review' The Art of Poetry, no 26 (1961)

“We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919) American artist, writer and activist

Source: Wild Dreams of a New Beginning

“To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.”

Mark Nepo (1951) American writer

“If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist

Acceptance speech of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (1952); also in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999) edited by Linda Lear, p. 91
Context: The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.

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