Quotes about poetry
A collection of quotes on the topic of poetry, poet, likeness, use.
Quotes about poetry
“We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.”
Niels Bohr (1885–1962) Danish physicist
In his first meeting with Werner Heisenberg in early summer 1920, in response to questions on the nature of language, as reported in Discussions about Language (1933); quoted in Defense Implications of International Indeterminacy (1972) by Robert J. Pranger, p. 11, and Theorizing Modernism : Essays in Critical Theory (1993) by Steve Giles, p. 28
Context: We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.
“Pure mathematics is in its way the poetry of logical ideas.”
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
1930s, Obituary for Emmy Noether (1935)
Context: Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. One seeks the most general ideas of operation which will bring together in simple, logical and unified form the largest possible circle of formal relationships. In this effort toward logical beauty spiritual formulas are discovered necessary for the deeper penetration into the laws of nature.
“Poetry, it's one of the most pretty nicknames we give to life.”
Jacques Prevért (1900–1977) French poet, screenwriter
Attributed
“If a poem hasn't ripped apart your soul; you haven't experienced poetry.”
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic
“one can never be sure whether it's good poetry or bad acid”
Charles Bukowski book Love Is a Dog from Hell
Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
A Treatise on Painting (1651); "The Paragone"; compiled by Francesco Melzi prior to 1542, first published as Trattato della pittura by Raffaelo du Fresne (1651)
Context: Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen. These two arts, you may call them both either poetry or painting, have here interchanged the senses by which they penetrate to the intellect.
“… and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”
Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate
Source: Death in Venice and Other Tales
“Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer
“Poetry is a lyrical insinuation. Often, its melodic subtlety kisses the subconscious mind.”
Masiela Lusha (1985) Albanian actress, writer, author
LaGuardia, Gina (October 2004). "Masiela's Musings". College Bound Teen (USA): p. 2.
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) Russian poet and essayist
Quoted in Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir (1970), ch. 35
“Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"
Source: The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82
“We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.”
Umberto Eco book Foucault's Pendulum
Source: Foucault's Pendulum
“Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.”
Bashō Matsuo (1644–1694) Japanese poet
Yukio Mishima book Runaway Horses
Source: Runaway Horses
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2018/06/02/books/book-reviews/yukio-mishimas-demons-full-force-runaway-horses/ note: Runaway Horses (1969)
“Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.”
Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game
Source: The Angel's Game
“The poetry of earth is never dead.”
John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet
" Sonnet. On the Grasshopper and the Cricket http://www.bartleby.com/126/28.html" <br class="br">Poems (1817)
“It was at that age
that poetry came in search of me.”
Pablo Neruda book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer
Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
“He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.”
George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying
“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. --Bernard, The Waves”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer
John Ruskin book Modern Painters
Volume III, part IV, chapter XVI (1856).
Modern Painters (1843-1860)
“Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.”
Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time
Source: Sculpting in Time
“Our tragic age demands poetry of courage and not whimpers about the inevitable end of all maya.”
Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004) Indian writer
Quotations by 60 Greatest Indians, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology http://resourcecentre.daiict.ac.in/eresources/iresources/quotations.html,
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar
Was sich thun lässt, so lange Philosophie und Poesie getrennt sind, ist gethan und vollendet. Also ist die Zeit nun da, beyde zu vereinigen.
“Ideas,” Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), § 108
Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer
Source: Bone: Dying into Life (2000), p. 165
Dennis O'Driscoll (1954–2012) Irish poet, critic
Interview with Eugene O'Connell 'Cork Literary Review vol xiii 2009
Poetry Quotes
“Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination.”
Max Planck (1858–1947) German theoretical physicist
As quoted in Advances in Biochemical Psychopharmacology, Vol. 25 (1980), p. 3
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist
Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious (1980)
Context: All intelligent persons also possess some larger-scale frame-systems whose members seemed at first impossibly different — like water with electricity, or poetry with music. Yet many such analogies — along with the knowledge of how to apply them — are among our most powerful tools of thought. They explain our ability sometimes to see one thing — or idea — as though it were another, and thus to apply knowledge and experience gathered in one domain to solve problems in another. It is thus that we transfer knowledge via the paradigms of Science. We learn to see gases and fluids as particles, particles as waves, and waves as envelopes of growing spheres.
“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”
Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet
Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1870), letter #342a of The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958), edited by Thomas H. Johnson, associate editor Theodora Ward, page 474
Source: Selected Letters
“Poetry is the shadow cast by our imaginations.”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919) American artist, writer and activist
These Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems, 1955-1993 (New Directions) ISBN: 0-0112-1273-4 0-0112-1252-1
“Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.”
Charles Simic (1938) American poet
Source: Dime-Store Alchemy
“We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
“A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.”
José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader
Dedication of the Statue of Liberty (1887)
Source: Versos Sencillos: Simple Verses
“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize”
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet
“After a full belly all is poetry.”
Frank McCourt (1930–2009) Irish-American teacher and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer
Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French writer and philosopher
A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (1988)
“Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.”
Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist
On Dramatic Poetry (1758)
“How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.”
Gregory Maguire book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
“There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.”
John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer
“There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope.”
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”
Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet
Variant: Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
“Love is poetry plus biology.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer
“Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919) American artist, writer and activist
Source: Poetry as Insurgent Art
“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright
Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918): Anima Hominis, part v
“Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?”
Alice Munro (1931) Canadian novelist
Source: Dear Life: Stories
“There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality”
Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author
The Enemies of Reason, "Slaves to Superstition" [1.01], 13 August 2007, timecode 00:38:16ff
The Enemies of Reason (August 2007)
Variant: Science is the poetry of reality.
Context: The word 'mundane' has come to mean boring and dull, and it really shouldn't. It should mean the opposite because it comes from the latin 'mundus', meaning the world, and the world is anything but dull; the world is wonderful. There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.
“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”
Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer
As quoted in Quote, Unquote (1989) by Jonathan Williams, p. 136
Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer
Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
T.S. Eliot book Tradition and the Individual Talent
Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)
Context: The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal." Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate
Source: Death in Venice and Other Tales
“I have nothing to say/ and I am saying it/ and that is poetry/ as I need it.”
John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer
"Lecture on Nothing" (1949)
1940s