Quotes about poetry page 3
Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor
"Tentative (First Model)" Definitions of Poetry" in Complete Poems (1950)
Tom Schulman (1950) American film director, screenwriter
Source: Dead Poets Society
“I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise
Source: This Side of Paradise
“Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.”
Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence
Source: The Age of Innocence
Theodore Sturgeon (1918–1985) American speculative fiction writer
As quoted in an interview with David Duncan http://www.physics.emory.edu/~weeks/misc/duncan.html <br class="br">Context: Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called "other", which is simply another universe, another planet, another species.
“Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.”
Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist
Source: The Story of My Life: With Her Letters (1887 1901) and a Supplementary Account of Her Education Including Passages from the Reports and Letters of Her Teacher Anne Mansfield Sullivan by John Albert Macy
“The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.”
"Kindness" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/kindness.html <br class="br">Source: Ariel (1965)
Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet
Source: The Akhmatova Journals, Volume I: 1938-1941
“A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote.”
Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932–2017) Russian poet, film director, teacher
Andrew R. MacAndrew (trans.) A Precocious Autobiography (1963; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) p. 7.
“We are surrounded by poetry on all sides…”
Vincent Van Gogh book The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Source: The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
“I have defined poetry as a 'passionate pursuit of the Real.”
Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator
“Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.”
George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss
Source: The Mill on the Floss
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) American writer
"Song of Winnie"
Winnie (1988)
Variant: My Poem is life, and not finished.
Context: My Poem is life, and not finished.
It shall never be finished.
My Poem is life, and can grow.
Wherever life can grow, it will.
It will sprout out,
and do the best it can.
I give you what I have.
You don’t get all your questions answered in this world.
How many answers shall be found
in the developing world of my Poem?
I don’t know. Nevertheless I put my Poem,
which is my life, into your hands, where it will do the best it can.
“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Context: Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
Context: For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
“Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.”
Mina Loy (1882–1966) Futurist poet and actress
Source: The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy
“I have my books and my poetry to protect me”
Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer
“Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught.”
Leslie Feinberg (1949–2014) activist and author known for authoring Stone Butch Blues
Source: Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue
“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
“Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.”
Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient
Source: The English Patient
“The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom”
Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist
“Deprivation is the mother of poetry.”
Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter
Source: The Favorite Game
Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature
Source: The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry
Craig Ferguson (1962) Scottish-born American television host, stand-up comedian, writer, actor, director, author, producer and voice a…
“Whoever doesn't live in poetry cannot survive here on earth.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author
Source: Under the Glacier
“I am two fools, I know,
For loving, and for saying so
In whining poetry.”
John Donne (1572–1631) English poet
The Triple Fool, stanza 1
Source: The Complete English Poems
“Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man.”
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet
Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer
Source: A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living
“Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.”
Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
“What she lacks in poetry she makes up for in venom”
Sarra Manning (1950) British writer
“I - will have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love. Love above all.”
Marc Norman (1941) Screenwriter
Source: Shakespeare in Love: A Screenplay
“Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States
Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer
Source: Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
“Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.”
Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor
“Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.”
Roberto Bolaño book The Savage Detectives
Source: The Savage Detectives
“I'm only interested in poetry.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer
Source: The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966
“breathe in experience breathe out poetry”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist
John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet
Letter to John Taylor (February 27, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)
Context: In Poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am from their centre. I think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity — it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance — Its touches of Beauty should never be halfway thereby making the reader breathless instead of content: the rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should like the Sun come natural to him — shine over him and set soberly although in magnificence leaving him in the luxury of twilight — but it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it — and this leads me on to another axiom. That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator
At an interview with Stephen Colbert at Montclair Kimberley Academy on January 29th, 2010.
2010s
“I find I cannot exist without Poetry”
John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet
Source: Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist
"Poetry is Not a Luxury"
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America
1963, Speech at Amherst College
Context: When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.
“If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher
12 July 1827.
Table Talk (1821–1834)
Variant: Poetry: the best words in the best order.
Context: I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in their best order.
“The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person…”
Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator
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
“Each of us has his own alphabet with which to create poetry.”
Irving Stone (1903–1989) American writer
“Like poetry, fashion does not state anything. It merely suggests”
Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019) German fashion designer
“There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.”
Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)
“[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist
Source: What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics