Quotes about poem
page 6

“To write good poems is the secret of brevity.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Simplicity http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21390/Simplicity From the poems written in English

Secret

“Part of making a poem is a process of day- dreaming.”

Robert Pinsky (1940) American poet, editor, literary critic, academic.

Singing School -Learning to Write (and read) Poetry W W Norton, New York 2013
Singing School

Dreams, Parting

“When modernist poetry, or what not so long ago passed for modernist poetry, can reach the stage where the following piece by Mr. Ezra Pound is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification for the plain reader and orthodox critic who shrinks from anything that may be labelled 'modernist' either in terms of condemnation or approbation…. Better he thinks, that ten authentic poets should be left for posterity to discover than one charlatan should be allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

Laura Riding and Robert Graves from A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1927)

Thinking

“As the glossaries lengthen, as the footnotes become more elementary and didactic, the poem, the epic, the drama, move out of balance on the actual page. As even the more rudimentary of mythological, religious or historical references, which form the grammar of Western literature, have to be elucidated, the lines of Spenser, of Pope, of Shelley or of Sweeney Among the Nightingales, blur away from immediacy. Where it is necessary to annotate every proper name and classical allusion in the dialogue between Jessica and Lorenzo in the garden at Belmont, or in Iachimo's stealthy rhetoric when he emerges in Imogen's bedchamber, these marvellous spontaneities of enacted feeling become "literary" and twice-removed.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"Tomorrow".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Feeling, Literature

“The Faerie Queene is the most extended and extensive meditation on sex in the history of poetry. It charts the entire erotic spectrum, a great chain of being rising from matter to spirit, from the coarsest lust to chastity and romantic idealism. The poem’s themes of sex and politics are parallel: the psyche, like society, must be disciplined by good government. Spenser agrees with the classical and Christian philosophers on the primacy of reason over animal appetites. He looks forward to the Romantic poets, however, in the way that he shows the sex impulse as ultimately daemonic and barbaric, breeding witches and sorcerers of evil allure. Like the Odyssey, The Faerie Queene is a heroic epic in which the masculine must evade female traps or delays.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 188

Sex, Way, History, Evil

“To put it most simply, the oral traditional idiom persisted because—even in a written incarnation—it offered the only avenue to the immanent poetic tradition, the invisible but ever-present aesthetic context for all of the poems.”

John Miles Foley (1947–2012) American literary scholar

"Texts That Speak to Readers Who Hear: Old English Poetry and the Languages of Oral Tradition", in Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen (1991), p. 155

“You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick… You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in. The joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

Poetic Manifesto

God, Tear, Joy

“A poem releases itself, it does it with cadence.”

Mark Strand (1934–2014) Canadian-American poet, essayist, translator

Paris Review Interview (1998)

“I have not used rhyme, because what is really, in the long run, of most interest to American readers is what the poems say; and if one uses rhyme, it is impossible not to sacrifice sense to sound.”

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) British academic

Translations from the Chinese (1941), p. 1

Sense

“I think what holds a poem like this together for me, if it’s held together, is largely meter; this one is in iambic pentameter and iambic pentameter whatever else it is, can be a very good glue. It is a very good way to hold things together. It’s like 4:4 you know.”

Robert Pinsky (1940) American poet, editor, literary critic, academic.

WPFW-FM inteview with Grace Cavalieri 1995/96 season

Way, Thinking

“I first read the poems in my early youth, with an ardent credulity that remained unshaken for many years of my life; and with a pleasure to which even the triumphant satisfaction of detecting the imposture is comparatively nothing. The enthusiasm with which I read and studied the poems, enabled me afterwards, when my suspicions were once awakened, to trace and expose the deception with greater success. Yet, notwithstanding the severity of minute criticism, I can still peruse them as a wild and wonderful assemblage of imitations, with which the fancy is often pleased and gratified, even when the judgment condemns them most.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

Malcolm Laing, The Poems of Ossian, Vol. I (1805), p. 441.
Criticism

Life, Pleasure, Youth, Study

“It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope; but you must not call it Homer.”

Richard Bentley (1662–1742) English classical scholar and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge

Of Pope's translation of The Iliad — as quoted in The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Eleven Volumes by John Hawkins, Vol. IV (1787), The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, "Life of Pope", footnote on p. 126.

“The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.”

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) American poet

Poetry and Craft (1965)

God, Time

“A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters.”

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

Speculations (Essays, 1924)

“I think Miss Moore was right to cut “The Steeple-Jack” — the poem seems plainer and clearer in its shortened state — but she has cut too much… The reader may feel like saying, “Let her do as she pleases with the poem; it’s hers, isn’t it?” No; it’s much too good a poem for that, it long ago became everybody’s, and we can protest just as we could if Donatello cut off David’s left leg.”

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

“Her Shield”, p. 177
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Feeling, Thinking

“(Songwriting) It's a gift. It all comes from somewhere. I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn't lived long enough to experience.”

Willie Nelson (1933) American country music singer-songwriter.

Source: Willie Nelson: 'If We Made Marijuana Legal, We'd Save a Whole Lotta Money and Lives', Michael, Hann, May 17, 2012, May 20, 2012, The Guardian, Guardian News and Media Ltd. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/may/17/30-minutes-with-willie-nelson,

“Many people say that I don't know how to draw because I don't draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem?”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

in a letter to Charles Morice (July 1901), from French Paintings and Painters from the Fourteenth Century to Post-Impressionism, ed. Gerd Muesham [Frederick Ungar, 1970, ISBN 0-8044-6521-5], p. 551
1890s - 1910s

People, Color, Understanding, Drawing

“It is difficult
to get the news from poems”

William Carlos Williams book Journey to Love

Journey to Love (1955), Asphodel, That Greeny Flower

“By reason of Arthur's position as its climax as well as of the long line of other traditional heroes, events and associations, and of its breadth of treatment, simplicity, intensity, enthusiasm, accord with the supernatural, vitality of imagination, elevation and sometimes nobility and religious feeling, the poem is the nearest thing we have to a traditional racial epic.”

Layamon (1200) English poet

J. S. P. Tatlock The Legendary History of Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950) p. 485.
Criticism

Feeling, Imagination

“In poetry much of the sense and most of the pleasure resides in the sounds the poem make.”

Michael Schmidt (poet) (1947) American poet

The Great Modern Poets, London, 2006

Pleasure, Sense

“In many of Albrecht Dürer’s engravings there are harrowing depictions of his own melancholia; the manic wheeling stars of Van Gogh are the precursors of the artist’s plunge into dementia and the extinction of self. It is a suffering that often tinges the music of Beethoven, of Schumann and Mahler, and permeates the darker cantatas of Bach. The vast metaphor which most faithfully represents this fathomless ordeal, however, is that of Dante, and his all-too-familiar lines still arrest the imagination with their augury of the unknowable, the black struggle to come:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
Ché la diritta via era smarrita.
In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.
One can be sure that these words have been more than once employed to conjure the ravages of melancholia, but their somber foreboding has often overshadowed the last lines of the best-known part of that poem, with their evocation of hope. To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists. But in science and art the search will doubtless go on for a clear representation of its meaning, which sometimes, for those who have known it, is a simulacrum of all the evil of our world: of our everyday discord and chaos, our irrationality, warfare and crime, torture and violence, our impulse toward death and our flight from it held in the intolerable equipoise of history. If our lives had no other configuration but this, we should want, and perhaps deserve, to perish; if depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy. But one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul’s annihilation; men and women who have recovered from the disease — and they are countless — bear witness to what is probably its only saving grace: it is conquerable.”

William Styron book Darkness Visible

Source: Darkness Visible (1990), X

Life, Death, Women, Men

“As a writer, I must keep writing, poems can never be forced, the muses will not be raped, so I feel this kind of prose (autobiography), however inadequate, share some of the exploratory features of the poetic use of language.”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

Tiger and the Rose, 1971

Feeling

“For honesty is before honor; and though man must write his poems in sounding words, God's poems are printed best in the brave and silent duties of common life.”

Isabella Fyvie Mayo (1843–1914) Scottish poet, novelist, reformer

Reported in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 388.

Life, God

“Poetry is an art form that demands heightened attention and retention. It both invites and rewards more intense involvement than we normally give to other kinds of speech. Poetic technique, therefore, is never esoteric but eminently practical. It serves at least two purposes. First, it announces that a poem differs from other kinds of speech, that it requires the audience's special attention. A poem begins by attracting our attention through its sound, shape, typography, syntax, texture, or tone. Second, the technique maintains the audience's involvement. All poetic form is a way of keeping the audience's attention beyond what ordinary language requires. Meter, for example, creates a gentle trance state in the auditor. Since poetry is more intense, condensed, and expressive than ordinary language, it needs these techniques to carry the burden of its message.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews

Art, Way

“This poem may have meant nothing to you but I am confident that tonight my taking the time to actually write out my anger instead of acting on it has saved the life of at least eleven people in parking enforcement.”

Buddy Wakefield (1974) American poet

Flare Guns and Earthquakes
Poetry

Life, People, Confidence, Time

“Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now. To perpetuate your feelings, to establish them. If you have in any way touched the central heart of mankind's feelings, you'll survive.”

Richard Eberhart (1904–2005) American poet

Quoted in his obituary Dartmouth College news release http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2005/06/10.html Other

Death, Way, Feeling, Heart

“The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

"Roles, Masks, and Performances", New Literary History, Vol. 2, No. 3, Performances in Drama, the Arts, and Society (Spring, 1971), p. 520
1970s

“He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Apology for Smectymnuus (1642)

Hope

“If this were true, the population of the world would be at a stand-still. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of death. I would suggest that the next edition of your poem should read: “Every moment dies a man, every moment 1 1/16 is born.” Strictly speaking, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.”

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable c…

New Scientist, 4 December 1958, pg.1428.
Comment in response to Alfred Tennyson’s poem Vision of Sin, which included the line Every moment dies a man, // every moment one is born.

Death, Truth, World, Birth

“It’s a cauld barren blast that blaws nobody good.” - title of poem.”

John Lyon (poet) (1803–1889) Scottish Latter Day Saint poet and hymn writer

The Harp of Zion (1853)

“Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for centuries. Maybe it also holds the key to poetry's future.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Children, Pleasure, Art, Future

“To make a Dadaist Poem (1920)

Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.”

Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist

Quote of Tzara's poem from 1920; as cited in Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, ed. Pericles Lewis (Cambridge UP, 2007), p. 107 - online: https://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/To_Make_a_Dadaist_Poem 1920s

“From the poet's viewpoint a lyric is a poem which embodies a single or simple emotional attitude that expresses directly an uninterrupted mood or inspiration.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

Form in Modern Poetry(1932)

Mood

“Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels.”

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

“An Unread Book”, p. 47
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Art, Music, Change, Perfection

“[ John Henry Newman's earlier poems are ] unequalled for grandeur of outline, purity of taste and radiance of total effect.”

Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897) English journalist

R.H. Hutton; cited in: Hugh Chisholm. The Encyclopaedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information, Volume 19, (1911), p. 519

“GRUBSTREET — The name of a street near Moorsfield, London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems.”

Samuel Johnson book A Dictionary of the English Language

A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

History

“I know I am in the grip of a true poem when I can hardly bear to read it calmly at first.”

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

Poetry Quotes

Reading

“The poem you sent me was as fiery and virile as anything you’ve ever written – or anybody else, for that matter. Especially the second part went to my brain like the flaming liquor of insanity. No one else besides Jack London has the power to move me just that way.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

From a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith (c. November 1928)
Letters

Way, Parting

“The essay was impelled by Clare's anxiety that his poems were slipping out if fashion.”

John Birtwhistle (1946) English poet

Clare's 'Popularity in Authorship (1824)

Fashion

“We may say that a poem in the first place should offer us new perceptions, not only of the exterior universe, but of human experience as well; it should add, in other words, to what we have already seen. This is the elementary function for the reader. The corresponding function for the poet is a sharpening and training of his sensibilities; the very exigencies of the medium as he employs it in the act of perception should force him to the discovery of values which he never would have found without the convening of all the conditions of that particular act, conditions one or more of which will be the necessity of solving some particular difficulty such as the location of a rhyme or the perfection of a cadence with disturbance to the remainder of the poem.”

Yvor Winters (1900–1968) American poet and literary critic

The Morality of Poetry
Primitivism and Decadence : A Study of American Experimental Poetry (1937)

Universe, Perfection, Training

“The vision of the artist or the poet is the intermediate determinant between the subject (the person) and the objective pole (the world-waiting-to-be). It will be nonbeing until the poet's struggle brings forth an answer — meaning. The greatness of a poem or a painting is not that it portrays the thing observed or experienced, but that it portrays the artist's or the poet's vision cued off by his encounter with the reality. Hence the poem or the painting is unique, original, never to be duplicated. No matter how many times Monet returned to paint the cathedral at Rouen, each canvas was a new painting expressing a new vision.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 4 : Creativity and the Encounter, p. 79

World, Reality, Time, Waiting

“The poem… is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see — it is, rather, a light by which we may see — and what we see is life.”

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) American poet, novelist, and literary critic

Saturday Review (22 March 1958)

Life, Light

“Sheer power of a great poem is enough to guarantee that it will ultimately make itself felt, if the reader is in a receptive mood.”

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

Interview Michael Garvey @Irish Literary Supplement' Fall 1998
Poetry Quotes

Mood

“You come out at night;
That's when the energy comes.
And the dark side's light,
And the vampires roam.
You strut your rasta wear
And your suicide poem
And a cross from a faith
That died before Jesus came.
You're building a mystery.”

Sarah McLachlan (1968) Canadian musician, singer, and songwriter

Building a Mystery, written by Sarah McLachlan and Pierre Marchand
Song lyrics, Surfacing (1997)

Faith, Suicide, Light, Night

“Automatic poetry comes straight out of the poet's bowels or out of any other of his organs that has accumulated reserves... He crows, swears, moans, stammers, yodels, according to his mood... His poems are like nature; they stink, laugh, and rhyme like nature. Foolishness, or at least what men calls foolishness is as precious to him as a sublime piece of rhetoric. For in nature a broken twig is equal in beauty and importance to the clouds and the stars.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Source: 1940s, Abstract Art, Concrete Art (c. 1942), p. 118-119

Men, Beauty, Star, Mood

“The more you understand a poem and its complexities and depth, the more you will be able to do when reading it aloud.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

Understanding, Reading

“A poem therefore is to be defined as a structure of words whose sound constitutes a rhythmical unity, complete in itself, irrefragable, unanalyzable, completing its symbolic references within the ambit of its sound effects.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

What is a Poem - Endword - Selected Poems (1926)

“The rhythmic pattern of the poem, which forces continuity of attention – incites a pleasurable compulsion to ‘follow’ – is either a tried metrical suasion-contrivance or a specially invented pattern of physical insistences, equally, if not more, binding in its effect on the reader. From a straight linguistic point of view, there is room for wonder if there is not latent vice in this environment in which pleasurable physically-compelled responses, produced by incidents of poetic utterance, are identified with the Good.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"The Promise of Words" in London Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 17, p. 23

Pleasure

“I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.”

Erica Jong (1942) Novelist, poet, memoirist, critic

"Into the lion's den" in The Guardian (26 October 2000) http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2000/oct/26/features11.g2

God, Hate, War, World

“Poetry is the most bodliy of arts, the medium of poetry is the column of breath rising from the diaphragm in the individual's chest to be shaped into meaning sounds inside the mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.”

Robert Pinsky (1940) American poet, editor, literary critic, academic.

The Art of Poetry - interview 1995 with Downing & Kunitz

Art

“The title [of an album with prints of Israels and poems after his pictures, made by Nicolaas Beets ] will not be I hope 'Kroost der zee' ['Offspring of the Sea']. I think this is an insufferable dissonance. Call it 'Sketches from Fisher's life - of B to J.' I think that is the best, the simplest and the most attractive name. Also the word 'to' gives me justice, otherwise people will think that I made them [his pictures] after Beets and not Beets [his poems] after me.”

Jozef Israëls (1824–1911) Dutch painter

translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat van Jozef Israëls in Nederlands): De titel [van een album met prenten van Israels en gedichten daarop van nl:Nicolaas Beets ] zal toch hoop ik niet zijn, 'Kroost der zee'.- zulks vind ik van een onuitstaanbare wanklank laat het heeten 'schetsen uit het visschersleven van B naar J. ' dat vind ik de beste eenvoudigste en meest aantrekkelijke naam. Tevens het woordje 'naar' doet mij regt, daar anders men meenen zoude dat ik ze naar Beets en niet Beets naar mij gemaakt heeft.
Quote in his letter to publisher A.C. Kruseman in The Hague, 1861; as cited in LTK 1390 nr. 11, University Library of Leiden
the compromise between Beets and Israëls became 'The Children of the Sea'; the album was published in four episodes, the first on 7 June, 1861
Quotes of Jozef Israels, 1840 - 1870

Life, People, Justice, Hope

“The poem goes form the poet’s gibberish to
The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change

“The Book of Boz is neither a novel nor a poem nor a tale. Even less is it a drama or an essay.
It is nothing except the style that inspires it and haunts it, to excess.
No points of reference here.
No beacon.
You sail wherever the wind blows.
Stories are woven, end, are reborn, with the flow, before a storm comes up to carry us further away, to the threshold of a new vision.
For, that is The Book of Boz : a work outside of norms, indefinable, created by a wanderer for other wanderers.”

Julien Friedler (1950) artist, writer

The Book of Boz http://www.spiritofboz.org/en/spirit-of-boz/the-book-of-boz/ The Spirit of Boz

Books

“All you can usually say about a poem or a picture is, 'Look at it, listen to it.' Whether you listen to a piece of music or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.”

Basil Bunting (1900–1985) Poet

Basil Bunting on Poetry ed Peter Makin, The Johns Hopkins University Press; New edition (1 Oct 2003) ISBN 978-0801877506

Music

“An achieved poem is always beautiful in its own way, though such a way will many times strike people as harsh and repellent.”

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) English poet and professor

A matter of timing: The Guardian, Saturday 21 September 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview28/print

People, Beauty, Way, Time

“One is forced to remember how far from "self-expression" great poems are — what a strange compromise between the demands of the self, the world, and Poetry they actually represent.”

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

"The Profession of Poetry," Partisan Review (September/October 1950) [p. 168]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

World

“Life is an ever-rolling wheel
And every day is the right one.
He who recites poems at his death
Adds frost to snow.”

Mumon Gensen (1323–1390)

Japanese Death Poems. Compiled by Yoel Hoffmann. ISBN 978-0-8048-3179-6

Life, Death

“Reading a poem aloud by someone who understands it, can be a crucial experience, but better yet is reading it aloud oneself.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

Understanding, Reading

“Luther's merit in literary history is of the greatest: his dialect became the language of all writing. They are not well written, these Four-and-twenty Quartos of his; written hastily, with quite other than literary objects. But in no Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged sterling sense and strength. He dashes out illumination from him; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good humor too, nay tender affection, nobleness and depth: this man could have been a Poet too! He had to work an Epic Poem, not write one.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Priest

Secret, Books, History, Sense

“In schools, for example, there are courses in the criticism of literature, art criticism, and so forth. The arts are supposed to be 'not real.' It is quite safe, therefore, to criticize them in that regard -- to see how a story or a painting is constructed, or more importantly, to critically analyze the structure of ideas, themes, or beliefs that appear, say, in the poem or work of fiction. When children are taught science, there is no criticism allowed. They are told, 'This is how things are.' Science's reasons are given as the only true statements about reality, with which no student is expected to quarrel. Any strong intellectual explorations or counter versions of reality have appeared in science fiction, for example. Here scientists, many being science-fiction buffs, can channel their own intellectual questioning into a safe form. 'This is, after all, merely imaginative and not to be taken seriously.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 145-146

Children, School, Art, Imagination

“Every great poem is in itself limited by necessity, — but in its suggestions unlimited and infinite.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

Table-Talk (1857)

“Daring with my poem 'Special Pleading' to give myself such freedom as I desired, in my own style”

Sidney Lanier (1842–1881) American musician, poet

From Memorial by William Hayes Ward to The Poems of Sidney Lanier (ed. Mary D Lanier)

Freedom

“Inspiration comes within a framework. A poem that gets out of hand is not a poem.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

“I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to Mr. Clarke (1816-04-01) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Life, People, Way, Motivation

“He who creates three to five haiku poems during a lifetime is a haiku poet. He who attains to completes ten is a master.”

Bashō Matsuo (1644–1694) Japanese poet

Matsuo Bashō, Collected Haiku Theory, eds. T. Komiya & S. Yokozawa, Iwanami, 1951 (Unknown translator)
Statements

“Poem: After the Bomb had Fallen”

Mary Wilson (1916–2018) British poet, wife of Harold Wilson

“My poems please the brave:
My poems, short and sincere,
Have the force of steel
Which forges swords.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

Source: Simple Verses (1891), V

Sincerity

“It is true that poems and stories generally have only a single name attached to them where authorship is concerned but in many ways they are born of much more than any single individual. They evolve out of meetings of minds, the collective heartbeats of communities, and the shared journeys of similar souls.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(Acknowledgments, p. 99).
Book Sources, The River of Winged Dreams (2010)

Way, Soul, Communication

“What I have created here in Italy is neither very big nor profound (in the old sense of the word), but formidable. This summer I painted paintings that are the most profound that exist in the absolute. Let me explain these things somewhat…. profoundness as I understand it, and as Nietzsche intended it, is elsewhere than where it has been searched for until now. – My paintings are small (the biggest is 50 x 70 cm), but each of them is an enigma, each contains a poem, an atmosphere (Stimmung) and a promise that you can not find in other paintings. It brings me immense joy to have painted them – when I exhibit them, possibly in Munich this spring, it will be a revelation for the whole world”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from De Chirico's letter to Mr. Fritz Gartz, Florence, 26 Jan. 1910; from LETTERS BY GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, GEMMA DE CHIRICO AND ALBERTO DE CHIRICO TO FRITZ GARTZ, MILAN-FLORENCE, 1908-1911 http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/559-567Metafisica7_8.pdf, p. 562 1908 - 1920

World, Search, Spring, Understanding

“Based on the metaphysical implications of the Dadaist dogma.... Arp's Reliefs [carvings] between 1916 and 1922 are among the most convincing illustrations of that anti- rationalistic era... Arp showed the importance of a smile to combat the sophistic theories of the moment. His poems of the same period stripped the word of its rational connotation to attain the most unexpected meaning through alliteration or plain nonsense.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

1921 - 1950
Source: 'Appreciations of other artists': Jean (Hans) Arp (sculptor, painter, writer) 1949, by Marcel Duchamp; as quoted in Catalog, Collection of the Societé Anonyme, eds. Michel Sanouillet / Elmer Peterson, London 1975, pp. 143- 159

Smile

“Print also created new literary forms and altered ideas of literary style. Medieval poetry was conceived for the ear, and each poem had to stand the test of recitation. In addition, medieval audiences were not always interested in the poet himself, since his work was known to them only through the interpretations of minstrels, who frequently rephrased poems to suit their own image and images. The printed page changed these conditions. Slowly, the printed poet came into a new relationship with his reader. He learned not to be so repetitive as his predecessors since a reader could be depended upon to return as often as needed to uncompromised passages. …After the flowering of dramatic poetry during the Elizabethan Age, the printed page substituted for the theater, and millions of children came to know Shakespeare only through this form.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)

Children, Age, Flowers, Idea

“Poem me no poems.”

Rose Macaulay (1881–1958) English novelist and writer

Quoted in Poetry Review, Autumn 1963

“My choices are rejections, since there is no other way,
but what I reject is more numerous,
denser, more demanding than before.
A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

"A Large Number"
Poems New and Collected (1998), A Large Number (1976)

Way, Loss

“Quote of Rembrandt's, from his short poem, 1634; on his own drawing of a lord with beard, very probably representing the court-master Burchard Grossmann in his 'album amicorum' (translation from the original Dutch: Anne Porcelijn)”

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) Dutch 17th century painter and etcher

1630 - 1640

Quotes, Drawing

“When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.”

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) American writer

"An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks", Contemporary Literature 11:1 (Winter 1970)

World, Thinking

“You've often heard me say – perhaps too often – that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more.”

Robert Frost The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost: A Backward Look, by Louis Untermeyer (1964), p. 18
1960s

“Nor let the critic, if he find the meaning of Camoens in some instances altered, imagine that he has found a blunder in the Translator. … It was not to gratify the dull few, whose greatest pleasure in reading a translation is to see what the author exactly says; it was to give a poem that might live in the English language which was the ambition of the Translator. … And the original is in the hands of the world.”

William Julius Mickle (1734–1788) British writer

Introduction (p. cli)
The Lusiad; Or, The Discovery of India: an Epic Poem (1776)

Pleasure, World, Imagination, Reading

“During the thirty years I have spent abroad I have felt I was more privileged than my Western colleagues, whether writers or teachers of literature, for events both recent and long past took in my mind a sharply delineated, precise form. Western audiences confronted with poems or novels written in Poland, Czechoslovakia or Hungary, or with films produced there, possibly intuit a similarly sharpened consciousness, in a constant struggle against limitations imposed by censorship. Memory thus is our force, it protects us against a speech entwining upon itself like the ivy when it does not find a support on a tree or a wall.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

Nobel lecture (8 December 1980)

Literature, Support, Tree, Teachers

“To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 4 (pp. 190-191).

“"About the Seduction of an Angel" [Über die Verführung von Engeln]; the poem actually stems from Brecht's own pen, but Brecht signed it with the name of his contemporary, fellow German author (in exile) Thomas Mann”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

As cited in Gregory Alexander Knott, Arnold Stadler: Heimat and Metaphysics http://books.google.gr/books?id=ylhXAAAAYAAJ&q=, Weidler Buchverlag, 2009, p. 30.

Angels

“All the poems of our lives are not yet made.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 214

“A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seed-word is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but or if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb.”

Alasdair Gray (1934–2019) Scottish writer and artist

"Prometheus", pp. 208-9.
Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)

Personality

“Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail,
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder,
That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze
Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder
Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind,
Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind,
An’ the poet and the painter far behind his rightful time
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), Chimes of Freedom

Freedom, Time, Madness

“What is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding? It is the deepest part of autobiography.”

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) American poet, novelist, and literary critic

"Poetry Is a Kind of Unconscious Autobiography" in The New York Times (12 May 1985)

Understanding, Parting

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. [Opening sentence. ]”

John Steinbeck book Cannery Row

Cannery Row (1945)

Dreams, Nostalgia, Light

“If I knew where poems come from. I'd go there.”

Michael Longley (1939) poet

'The Observer ' article March 24 1991

“I do this in my long poems. I have to move between one thing and another and this oscillation is the way I find out what I'm trying to say”

Anne Simpson (1956) Canadian poet

Susan Olding Interview (February 23, 2010)

Way

“But the amateur who reads poetry from love or curiosity does have at least one advantage over the trained specialist who reads it from professional obligation. Amateurs have not learned to shut off parts of their consciousness to focus on only the appropriate elements of a literary text. They respond to poems in the sloppy fullness of their humanity”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

19
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Love, Learning, Reading, Parting

“Acosta: What the President is proposing here does not sound like it's in keeping with American tradition when it comes to immigration. The says, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." It doesn't say anything about speaking English or being a computer programmer. Aren't you trying to change what it means to an immigrant coming into this country if you're telling them you have to speak English? Can't people learn to speak English when they get here?
Miller: Well, first of all, right now it's a requirement to be you have to speak English, so the notion that speaking English wouldn't be a part of the immigration system would actually be very ahistorical. Secondly, I don't want to get off into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty enlightening the world, it's a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you're referring to was added later, is not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty.”

Stephen Miller (1985) political advisor for policy

2010s

People, World, History, Light

“There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1830s, Sir Walter Scott (1838)

Life, World

“It has been said that Homer was the Bible of the Greeks. The remark exactly misses the truth. The Greeks fortunately had no Bible, and this fact was both an expression and an important condition of their freedom. Homer's poems were secular, not religious, and it may be noted that they are freer from immorality and savagery than sacred books that one could mention.”

J. B. Bury book A History of Freedom of Thought

p. 24 http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t71v5g25n;view=1up;seq=28 A History of Freedom of Thought (1913)

Truth, Books, Freedom

“Degas was discussing poetry with Mallarmé; "It isn't ideas I'm short of… I've got too many", said Degas. "But Degas," replied Mallarmé, "you can't make a poem with ideas. … You make it with words.”

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) French Symbolist poet

From Degas, Manet, Morisot by Paul Valéry (trans. David Paul), Princeton University Press, 1960.
Observations

Idea

“The spoken Word, the written Poem, is said to be an epitome of the man; how much more the done Work. Whatsoever of morality and of intelligence; what of patience, perseverance, faithfulness, of method, insight, ingenuity, energy; in a word, whatsoever of Strength the man had in him will lie written in the Work he does. To work: why, it is to try himself against Nature, and her everlasting unerring Laws; these will tell a true verdict as to the man.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Lie, Faith, Law, Intelligence

“Words are not deeds. In published poems — we think first of Eliot's "Jew", words edge closer to deeds. In Céline's anti-Semitic textbooks, words get as close to deeds as words can well get. Blood libels scrawled on front doors are deed.
In a correspondence, words are hardly even words. They are soundless cries and whispers, "gouts of bile," as Larkin characterized his political opinions, ways of saying, "Gloomy old sod, aren't I?" Or more simply, "Grrr."
Correspondences are self-dramatizations. Above all, a word in a letter is never your last word on any subject. There was no public side to Larkin's prejudices, and nothing that could be construed as a racist — the word suggest a system of thought, rather than an absence of thought, which would be closer to the reality, closer to the jolts and twitches of self response.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

Way, Thinking, Reality

“There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Preface to Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship http://books.google.com/books?id=LXFbAAAAMAAJ&q=&quot;There+is+something+about+a+bureaucrat+that+does+not+like+a+poem&quot; (1969) Preface to Sex, Death, and Money http://books.google.com/books?id=54JBAAAAIAAJ&q=&quot;There+is+something+about+a+bureaucrat+that+does+not+like+a+poem&quot; (1969) 1960s

“I did not want my son remembered by uncontrolled howls of pain. My wife and I suffered more than I can express, but to make poems merely out of the agony would have been self-pitying and dishonest. My son had been my greatest joy. His birth had left me awe-struck and humble before life. He turned me from a son into a father — and allowed me to understand my own father clearly for the first time. If I mourned him, I also wanted to preserve the joyful mystery of his existence. The sorrow could not be adequately appreciated without also expressing the joy and wonder.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews

Life, Pain, Birth, Understanding