Quotes about poetry
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“If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Variant: It ought to come like the leaves to the trees, or it better not come at all.

“I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them.”

Kathleen Norris (1880–1966) American writer

Source: The Cloister Walk

Life, Children, Religion, Way

“but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

God

“I really think that everyone should have watercolors, magnetic poetry, and a harmonica.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Thinking

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World

Variant: I want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want sin.
Source: Brave New World

God, Freedom

“I read poetry to save time.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

Time, Reading

“I gotta say"—Apollo broke the silence—"these kids did okay." He cleared his throat and began to recite: "—"

Um, yes, first class," Hermes interrupted, like he was anxious to avoid Apollo's poetry.”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

Silence

“Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

As quoted in Robert Frost: the Trial by Existence (1960) by Elizabeth S. Sergeant, Ch. 18
1960s
Variant: Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Life, Way

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Communication

“One should always be drunk. That's all that matters… But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Wine

“All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.”

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist

“I have my books
And my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock,
I am an island.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Source: Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits

Books

“I keep thinking about blood. I dream about it. Wake up thinking about it. Pretty soon I'll be writing morbid emo poetry about it.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Simon to Clary, pg. 217
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)

Dreams, Thinking

“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)

Books, Reading

“Music resembles poetry, in each
Are nameless graces which no methods teach,
And which a master hand alone can reach.”

Alexander Pope An Essay on Criticism

Source: An Essay on Criticism

Music

“Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.”

Shirley Hazzard (1931–2016) Australian-Anglo-American novelist, short story writer, memoirist, non-fiction writer

Life, Pleasure

“To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie—
True Poems flee”

Emily Dickinson book The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Lie, Books, Summer

“He found himself wanting to write poetry about how her blue eyes were like starlight and her hair like night, because "night" and "starlight" rhymed, but he had a feeling the poem wouldn't turn out that well…”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Feeling, Night

“When you meet a swordsman, draw your sword: Do not recite poetry to one who is not a poet.”

Robert Greene book The 48 Laws of Power

Source: The 48 Laws of Power

Drawing

“Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.”

J.M. Coetzee book Disgrace

Source: Disgrace

“Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara.
O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac”

Frank O'Hara (1926–1966) American poet, art critic and writer

“I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.”

Allen Ginsberg book Howl and Other Poems

Source: Howl and Other Poems

People

“For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

Way

“He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.”

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Source: Arcadia

“Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Source: The Hero With a Thousand Faces

History, Science

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes indeed.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Variant: Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
Source: A Poetry Handbook

Life

“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

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

Beauty

“Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

“As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.”

N. Scott Momaday (1934) American author

“Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Life

“Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.”

Dorianne Laux (1952) American poet

Source: The Poet's Companion: A Guide To The Pleasures Of Writing Poetry

Way

“Publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.”

Don Marquis (1878–1937) American writer

Books, Waiting

“Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.”

Jasper Fforde book First Among Sequels

Source: First Among Sequels

World, Light

“One must read poetry with one's nerves.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Reading

“McGough: I'm sorry. I'm afraid I've caught poetry.

Mr Bones: Oh really? Well, don't worry, sir - I used to suffer from short stories.

McGough: Really? When?

Mr Bones: Oh, once upon a time…”

Graham Chapman (1941–1989) English comedian, writer and actor

Suffering, Time

“There's no poetry in me, Reginleit. No fine words." He stared down at her, his gaze seeming to consume her. "I come to you as a man unfinished.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Dreams of a Dark Warrior

“Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919) American artist, writer and activist

Source: Americus, Book I

Heart

“That’s what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn’t worry — poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

Alcohol, Coffee, Suicide

“One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.”

Stephen Sondheim (1930) American composer and lyricist

Music

“A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Life, Literature

“Who wants to understand the poem
Must go to the land of poetry;
Who wishes to understand the poet
Must go to the poet's land.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

West-östlicher Diwan, motto (1819)

Understanding

“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 are talking here about the future: about the lives of people in the world without wars, without social oppression, without national inequality, without suppression of human’s abilities. In other word, it is about the future that we all call Communism. We strive to imagine (and show to the viewer) the reality of the 21st century - the life of future humans developing, solving their difficulties and problems but being already on the new levels of cognition and morality. But the foundation of that future is being laid now. We strive to represent the future people as vivid and free, in the unity of their joys and cares, poetry and prose of their life. We are in no way satisfied with the primitive and unconvincing image of "people of the future", which can be observed in some works of literature and cinema. At the same time, we consider our work to be polemical with the many books and movies produced by the bourgeois world, which tend to see the future in an apocalyptic or technocratic way, affirming a sort of disbelief in the strength and capabilities of a human being.”

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) Soviet and Russian film-maker, writer, film editor, film theorist, theatre and opera director

Letter to the central committee of the CPSU (Communist Party of Soviet Union) https://varjag2007su.livejournal.com/2591915.html?utm_source=fbsharing&utm_medium=social (20 October 1970).

Life, War, People, Books

“If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.”

Charlotte Brontë book Shirley

Source: Shirley (1849), Ch. 1: Levitical

Thinking, Passion

“The plain fact is that many of the reputations which today occupy the poetic limelight are such as would crumble immediately if poetry such as Empson's, with its passion, logic, and formal beauty, were to become widely known.”

William Empson (1906–1984) English literary critic and poet

John Wain "Ambiguous Gifts", in The Penguin New Writing no. 40 (1950); cited from John Lehmann and Roy Fuller (eds.) The Penguin New Writing 1940-1950: An Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) p. 492.
Criticism

Beauty, Passion

“Yours is the guilt of all, who, judging wrong,
Mistake tuned nonsense for the poet's song!
Provoking dulness!—what a soul has he
Who fancies rhyme, and measure, poetry!—
He thinks, profanely, that this generous art
Stops at the ear—with power to shake the heart.”

Aaron Hill (writer) (1685–1750) British writer

Advice to the Poets (1731), p. 32

Art, Soul, Thinking, Heart

“A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry is a standard Oscar Williams production… …the book has the merit of containing a considerably larger selection of Oscar Williams’s poems than I have seen in any other anthology. There are nine of his poems — and five of Hardy’s. It takes a lot of courage to like your own poetry almost twice as well as Hardy’s.”

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

“A Verse Chronicle”, pp. 157–158
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Books, Courage

“Som-Som would later learn that the girl's name was Book. Ambiguous and suggestive sentences swirled out from the maroon bud of her nipple. Verses of elegant and cryptic passion followed the orbit of her left eye. Her fingers dripped with poetry.”

Alan Moore Alan Moore's Hypothetical Lizard

Alan Moore's Hypothetical Lizard, #1 (January 2005)
Alan Moore's Hypothetical Lizard (January 2005 - May 2005)

Books, Girl, Learning, Passion

“Very few writers of verse can read their work to keep their listeners aware of the beauty of sense, that sense of beauty from the powerful, delicate ways in which sense is made by poetry.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

'Poetry' September 1995

Beauty, Way, Sense, Reading

“Poetry's only crucial attribute is rhythm. This is its heartbeat. This makes it memorable. If the rhythm falters, then the poem dies of heart failure.”

Michael Longley (1939) poet

Failure, Heart

“I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.”

Henry David Thoreau book Life Without Principle

Life Without Principle (1863)

Life, Business, Thinking

“Thou, Poetry, in absence wert a chain,
Binding our hearts together: where so well
As in thy numbers, could I pour my soul,
In soothing tenderness? 'twas bliss, to make
Thought visible to those of whom I thought.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Farewell
The Fate of Adelaide (1821)

Soul, Heart

“Consider some of the qualities of typical modernistic poetry: very interesting language, a great emphasis on connotation, "texture"; extreme intensity, forced emotion — violence; a good deal of obscurity; emphasis on sensation, perceptual nuances; emphasis on details, on the part rather than on the whole; experimental or novel qualities of some sort; a tendency toward external formlessness and internal disorganization — these are justified, generally, as the disorganization required to express a disorganized age, or, alternatively, as newly discovered and more complex types of organization; an extremely personal style — refine your singularities; lack of restraint — all tendencies are forced to their limits; there is a good deal of emphasis on the unconscious, dream structure, the thoroughly subjective; the poet's attitudes are usually anti-scientific, anti-common-sense, anti-public — he is, essentially, removed; poetry is primarily lyric, intensive — the few long poems are aggregations of lyric details; poems usually have, not a logical, but the more or less associational style of dramatic monologue; and so on and so on. This complex of qualities is essentially romantic; and the poetry that exhibits it represents the culminating point of romanticism.”

Randall Jarrell book Five Young American Poets

"A Note on Poetry," preface to The Rage for the Lost Penny: Five Young American Poets (New Directions, 1940) [p. 49]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Age, Dreams, Sense, Parting

“Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

March 1845
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

“Writers are not neccessarily articulate simply because poetry is their stock-in-trade.”

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

Introduction -'Stepping Stones' interviews with Seamus Heaney Faber & Faber 2009
Poetry Quotes

“I'd love to write another song
Baby especially for you
I'd love to write another song
And feel things bright and new
In poetry I'd carve it well
I'd even make it rhyme
I'd love to write another song
Just to get some peace of mind.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

I'd Love to Write Another Song
Song lyrics, Avalon Sunset (1989)

Love, Peace, Feeling, Baby

“Poetry is a magic of pauses … not a thing of tunes, but of heightened consciousness.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

Poetry and Criticism - American Peoples Encyclopedia , Groller , New York 1965

“The poetry I love is written with someone’s voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone’s voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified.”

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

Sleigh, Tom. "Robert Pinsky", ‘’BOMB Magazine’’ Summer, 1998. .
Other

Love, Sense, Reading

“Don't ever think the poetry is dead in an old man because his forehead is wrinkled, or that his manhood has left him when his hand trembles! If they ever were there, they are there still!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

Thinking, Dead

“I sat smiling wretchedly, my heart weeping for The Little Dog Laughed, for every well-turned phrase, for the little flecks of poetry through it, my first story, the best thing I could show for my whole life. It was the record of all that was good in me, approved and printed by the great J. C. Hackmuth, and she had torn it up and thrown it into a spittoon.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Life, Smile, Dogs, Heart

“I should strive (on reading a book of poetry) to evoke the a soul out of this piece of inanimate matter, a something characteristic and structural inherent in this organic form which is friendly to me and responds to my mood.”

John Gould Fletcher (1886–1950) American writer

Preface to Goblins and Pagodas, 1916

Books, Soul, Mood, Reading

“I decided (after listening to a "talk radio" commentator who abused, vilified, and scorned every noble cause to which I had devoted my entire life) that I was both a humanist and a liberal, each of the most dangerous and vilified type. I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create a reasonably decent society. I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. I do not believe that pure reason can solve the perpetual problems unless it is modified by poetry and art and social vision. So I am a humanist. And if you want to charge me with being the most virulent kind—a secular humanist—I accept the accusation.”

James A. Michener (1907–1997) American author

Interview, Parade magazine (24 November 1991)

Life, Men, Art, History

“French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

1960s, Review of Teilhard de Chardin's "The Phenomenon of Man", 1961

Nature

“concerning this selfstyled world's greatest and most generous literary figure: who had just arrived in our nation's capitol, attired in half a GI uniform and ready to be hanged as a traitor by the only country which ever made even a pretense of fighting for freedom of speech
Re Ezra Pound — poetry happens to be an art; and artists happen to be human beings.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Re Ezra Pound (p. 69)
i : six nonlectures (1953)

World, Art, Freedom, Fight

“Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

As quoted in The New York Times (26 March 1961)

“Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no [Virginias]. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.”

Francis Pharcellus Church Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus (1897)

World, Faith, Sense, Light

“If you look at early shamanic texts and cultures, the magical powers that the shaman hopes the gods might give him, flying, turning into animals, invisibility, poetry – as if poetry was a magic power. As if it was the equivalent of turning into a dog or flying. As if. What does this tell us? Maybe there was a time when we could legitimately ask the gods for it as a gift. But we know there aren’t any gods, and that they can’t give those gifts, so the best thing we can do is go to church, listen to the lesson and hope we don’t burn. Have no direct contact with whatever form of god we choose to worship. It’s like the magical or spiritual equivalent of the big flaw in Marxism. Karl Marx, lovely geezer, very humane, a bit middle class but we’ll gloss over that, but his big flaw was that when he said “The reins of society will inevitably rest in the hands of those who control the means of production” didn’t take into account middle management. All the people who get between those with the means of production and the society. That translates onto a spiritual level as the shift from our earliest beliefs, which are all shamanic.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

Love, God, People, Dogs

“Consciousness is not wholly, nor even primarily a device for receiving sense-impressions. …there is another outlook than the scientific one, because in practice a more transcendental outlook is almost universally admitted. …who does not prize these moments that reveal to us the poetry of existence?”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Sense, Universe

“He was the first highly educated and cultured Filipino to direct he attention of his countrymen to their illustrious men, and to their art, literature, poetry and music.”

Epifanio de los Santos (1871–1928) Filipino politician

As quoted by Hartendorp “Don Pañong – Genius" in Philippine Magazine (September 1929).
BALIW

Men, Education, Art, Music

“I wanted to be a poet as a child and I have a wall in my study dedicated to poetry books, all in alphabetical order, that reminds me daily of my failure.”

Colm Tóibín (1955) Irish novelist and writer

World of Colm Tóibín, writer http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/9108553/World-of-Colm-Toibin-writer.html, The Daily Telegraph (27 February 2012)

Books, Failure, Study

“Whether we believe the Greek poet, "it is sometimes even pleasant to be mad", or Plato, "he who is master of himself has knocked in vain at the doors of poetry"; or Aristotle, "no great genius was without a mixture of insanity"; the mind cannot express anything lofty and above the ordinary unless inspired. When it despises the common and the customary, and with sacred inspiration rises higher, then at length it sings something grander than that which can come from mortal lips. It cannot attain anything sublime and lofty so long as it is sane: it must depart from the customary, swing itself aloft, take the bit in its teeth, carry away its rider and bear him to a height whither he would have feared to ascend alone.”

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

In Latin, nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit (There is no great genius without some touch of madness). This passage by Seneca is the source most often cited in crediting Aristotle with this thought, but in Problemata xxx. 1, Aristotle says: 'Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholic?' The quote by Plato is from the Dialogue Phaedrus (245a).
On Tranquility of the Mind

Fear, Singing, Madness

“Poetry is a collaborative art, and yet—as it is being created—the most solitary and 'individual' of activities.”

Michael Schmidt (poet) (1947) American poet

Reading Modern Poetry, London, 1989

Art

“Even Voltaire's father could not make a lawyer out of a genius. To be a good lawyer, one must have a mind and a disposition to venerate the past; a respect for precedents; a belief in the wisdom and the sanctity of the dead. Voltaire had genius, imagination, feeling, and poetry, and these gifts always have been, and always will be, incompatible with the practice of law.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Voltaire (1916)

Wisdom, Law, Feeling, Imagination

“The whole prospect of Gaelic appals me, the more I think of the difficulties and the likelihood of its extinction in a generation or two. A … language with … no modern prose of any account, no philosophical or technical vocabulary to speak of, no correct usage except among old people and a few university students, colloquially full of gross English idiom lately taken over, exact shades of meanings of most words not to be found in any of its dictionaries and dialectally varying enormously (what chance of the appreciation of the overtones of poetry, except amongst a handful?) Above all, all economic, social and political factors working against it, and, with that, the notorious, moral cowardice of the Highlanders themselves.”

Sorley MacLean (1911–1996) Scottish poet

Sorley MacLean, June 1943, quoted in Krause, Corinna. "Translating Gaelic Scotland" https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/beae/ab4c968782c1c0eeb7ee0f9459d009fab52d.pdf and "Gaelic Scotland – A Postcolonial Site?" https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_41178_en.pdf <br class="br">Letters and interviews

People, Thinking, Universe, Chance

“The forms [of poetry] are subsets of the principles that govern the cosmos itself which, by its very definition is: a complete, orderly, harmonious system.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)

“The default designation of poetry has become written poetry. That's why we have to prefix the adjective "oral," because the unmodified noun no longer covers anything but written poetry. That's also why we resort to other unwieldy phrases to pigeonhole events and phenomena that our cultural proclivities have silently eliminated from consideration. Thus a "poetry reading" describes a performance (from a published text, of course) before a well-behaved, often academic audience. Thus "spoken-word poetry"—so redundant from a historical perspective—identifies voiced verbal art, verse that is lifted off the page and into the world of presence and experience.”

John Miles Foley (1947–2012) American literary scholar

How to Read an Oral Poem (2002), p. 30

World, Art, Reading

“The crown of literature is poetry.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

Count Leo Tolstoi
Essays in Criticism, second series (1888)

Literature

“Poetry is a blossom of very delicate growth, it requires the maturing influence of vernal suns and every encouragement of culture and attention to bring it to its natural perfection.”

Henry Kirke White (1785–1806) English poet

Melancholy Hours

Nature, Sun, Perfection

“As poetry is a species of art, its essential principle must be a specific development of the principle essential to all art; and it will merely remain for us to determine what the specific addition is, which the peculiar conditions of the poet's art make to the principle of art in general.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.182

Art

“A word — a name —
Conjures the past before me, till it grows
More actual than the present : that — I see
But with the common eyes of daily life,
Imperfect and impatient; but the past
Out of imagination works its truth,
And grows distinct with poetry.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(1836-2) (Vol.47) Subjects for Pictures
The Monthly Magazine

Life, Truth, Imagination, Past

“I got magic and I got poetry in my fingertips.”

Charlie Sheen (1965) American film and television actor

On The Alex Jones Show February 24 2011

“… I must say, it [the Koran] is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite; — insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran … It is the confused ferment of a great rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even read; but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in words … We said "stupid:" yet natural stupidity is by no means the character of Mahomet's Book; it is natural uncultivation rather. The man has not studied speaking; in the haste and pressure of continual fighting, has not time to mature himself into fit speech … The man was an uncultured semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still clinging to him: we must take him for that. But for a wretched Simulacrum, a hungry Impostor without eyes or heart … we will not and cannot take him. Sincerity, in all senses, seems to me the merit of the Koran; what had rendered it precious to the wild Arab men … Curiously, through these incondite masses of tradition, vituperation, complaint, ejaculation in the Koran, a vein of true direct insight, of what we might almost call poetry, is found straggling.”

Thomas Carlyle book On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History

Thomas Carlyle, "On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History" (1841), pg. 64-67
1840s

Men, Books, Stupidity, Soul

“Once early in the morning, at two or three in the morning, when the master was asleep, the books in the library began to quarrel with each other as to which was the king of the library. The dictionary contended quite angrily that he was the master of the library because without words there would be no communication at all. The book of science argued stridently that he was the master of the library for without science there would have been no printing press or any of the other wonders of the world. The book of poetry claimed that he was the king, the master of the library, because he gave surcease and calm to his master when he was troubled. The books of philosophy, the economic books, all put in their claims, and the clamor was great and the noise at its height when a small low voice was heard from an old brown book lying in the center of the table and the voice said "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want."”

Louis Nizer (1902–1994) American lawyer

And all of the noise and the clamor in the library ceased, and there was a hush in the library, for all of the books knew who the real master of the library was.
"Ministers of Justice", Address delivered at the Eighty-Second Annual Convention of the Tennessee Bar Association at Gatlinburg, June 5, 1963; published in 31 Tennessee Law Review 1 (Fall 1963), p. 19.

Books, World, Communication, Lying

“If you put it as “complex nervous systems” it sounds pretty deflationary. What's so special about a complex nervous system? But of course, that complex nervous system allows you to do calculus. It allows you to do astrophysics… to write poetry… to fall in love. Put under that description, when asked “What’s so special about humans…?”, I’m at a loss to know how to answer that question. If you don’t see why we’d be special… because we can do poetry [and] think philosophical thoughts [and] we can think about the morality of our behavior, I’m not sure what kind of answer could possibly satisfy you at that point.
…I could pose the same kinds of questions of you… So God says, “You are guys are really, really special.” How does his saying it make us special? “But you see, he gave us a soul.””

Shelly Kagan (1956) American philosopher

How does our having a soul make us special? Whatever answer you give, you could always say… “What’s so special about that?”
Debate: Is God Necessary for Morality? (2011)

Love, God, Guy, Behavior

“Forty years ago, when Dylan Thomas read, he spent half the program reciting other poets' work. Hardly a self-effacing man, he was nevertheless humble before his art. Today most readings are celebrations less of poetry than of the author's ego. No wonder the audience for such events usually consists entirely of poets, would-be poets, and friends of the author.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Art, Reading

“If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems — people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets — it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."”

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

"Verse Chronicle," The Nation (23 February 1946); reprinted as "Bad Poets" in Poetry and the Age (1953)
General sources

People, Feeling, Intelligence, Universe

“Hebrew poetry is,
prose with a sort of heightened consciousness' Ecstasy
affords
the occasion expediency, determines the form”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

The Past is the Present
Collected Poems (1951)

“Harmony, rhythm, concision, concinnity are all elements that are epitomized in poetry. Cultivated in poetry, which is the nucleus of the creative impulse, these elemetns serve every art form: acting a character, writing a novel, creating music, dance, sculpture, painting.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Degrees: Thought Capsules and Micro Tales (1989)

Art, Music, Dance, Painting

“I know what his poetry will be about. What poetry is always about. The cruelty of the poet's mistress.”

Martin Amis book London Fields

London Fields (1989)

“The source of all imagination is here in our fields, and Creation is beautiful enough for the furthest flights of the poets. What is called realism only falls far from these flights because it is too meticulously concerned with the detail of material; mere inventories of rocks are not poetry; but all the memories of crags and hills and meadows and woods and sky that lie in a sensitive spirit are materials for poetry, only waiting to be taken out, and to be laid before the eyes of such as care to perceive them.”

Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) Irish writer and dramatist

Patches of Sunlight

Lie, Beauty, Imagination, Memory

“Sculpture and painting are moments of life. Poetry is life itself.”

Florence Earle Coates (1850–1927) American writer and poet

On poetry

Life, Painting

“The question of originality, if it arises at all, can never be peripheral: originality is more than a requirement in good poetry, it is a description of it.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Two Essays on Theodore Roethke'
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)

Question

“Let us look to beautiful poetry for the material of a beautiful prose.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Beauty

“Q: Why is America the land of the overrated child and the underrated adult? Q: How can children grow up in a world in which adults idolize youthfulness? Q: What happens when the ad makers taker over all the popular myths and poetry?”

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

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 141

Children, Youth, World

“Rhythm and repetition of sounds, words and phrases make spoken poetry sound different to ordinary discourse.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

“Lyric poetry is a kind of poetry that's literally musical.”

Jan Zwicky (1955) Canadian philosopher

The Details interview with Jay Ruzesky (Winter 2008)

Music

“It is said in the Book of Poetry, "In silence is the offering presented, and the spirit approached to; there is not the slightest contention." Therefore the superior man does not use rewards, and the people are stimulated to virtue. He does not show anger, and the people are awed more than by hatchets and battle-axes.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Doctrine of the Mean

People, Books, Silence, Anger

“It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one’s eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

C'est à la fois par la poésie et à travers la poésie, par et à travers la musique, que l'âme entrevoit les splendeurs situées derrière le tombeau; et, quand un poème exquis amène les larmes au bord des yeux, ces larmes ne sont pas la preuve d'un excès de jouissance, elles sont bien plutôt le témoignage d'une mélancolie irritée, d'une postulation des nerfs, d'une nature exilée dans l'imparfait et qui voudrait s'emparer immédiatement, sur cette terre même, d'un paradis révélé.
XI: "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III," IV
L'art romantique (1869)

Music, Way, Soul, Nature

“…modern poetry is necessarily obscure; if the reader can’t get it, let him eat Browning…”

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

“Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden’s Poetry”, p. 149
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“The fundamental values of a true community are elsewhere: in love, poetry, disinterested thought, the free use of the imagination, the pursuit of non-utilitarian activities, the production of non-profitmaking goods, the employment of non-consumable wealth - here are the sustaining values of a living culture.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

Faith for Living (1940)

Love, Imagination, Communication, Wealth

Quotes about poetry page 4

Quotes about poetry
page 4