Quotes about Poetry
Part I
Michael P. Garofalo
One demands two things of a
poem. Firstly, it must be a well-made
verbal object that does honor to the language in which it is written.
Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common
to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective. What the poet
says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his
readers recognize its validity for themselves.
- W. H. Auden
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
- Robert Frost
Poetry lies its way to
truth.
- John Ciardi
Poetry is the
deification of reality.
- Edith Sitwell
Poetry is ordinary
language raised to the N th power.
- Paul Engle
The language beneath the language:
This is poetry.
- Andrea Pacione
Everyone has a talent, what is rare is the
courage to follow
the talent to the dark place where it leads.
- Erica Jong
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty
of the world,
and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is not the
record of an event: it is an event.
- Robert Lowell
Painting is silent
poetry, and poetry is a speaking picture.
- Simonides
A poem should not mean
but be.
- Archibald MacLeish
Poetry is when an emotion has found its
thought
and the thought has found words.
- Robert Frost
If a poem is written
well, it was written with the poet's voice
and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a
poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music
and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.
- Robert Pinsky
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born
between the hill
and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the
timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
- Pablo Neruda
Perhaps no person can
be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry,
without a certain unsoundness of mind.
- Thomas Babington Macaulay
Poetry is the journal of the sea animal
living on land, wanting
to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the
barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a
phantom script telling how rainbows are made and
why they go away.
- Carl Sandburg
Imagination is the only weapon in the war
against reality.
- Jules de Gautier
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
- Paul Valery
Poetry is just the
evidence of life.
If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
- Leonard Cohen
We tend to be so
bombarded with information, and we move so
quickly, that there is a tendency to treat everything on the surface
level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of
openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry.
- Rita Dove
Poetry is being, not doing.
- E.E. Cummings
In science one tries
to tell people, in such a way as to be
understood by everyone, something that no one ever
knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
- Paul Dirac
Poets utter great and wise
things which
they do not themselves understand.
- Plato
The Poetry Notebooks of Michael P. Garofalo
It is true that the
poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does
address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a
congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they
constitute his ideal audience and his better self. ... To this congress the
poet
speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most
common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men.
- Richard Wilbur
Reality only reveals
itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.
- Georges Braque
It's a sad fact about our culture that a
poet can
earn much more money writing or talking about
his art than he can by practicing it.
- W. H. Auden
To have great poets
there must be great audiences too.
- Walt Whitman
With my whole body I taste these peaches,
I touch them and smell them. Who speaks?
- Wallace Stevens
Poetry gives you permission to feel.
- James Autry
Poetry is the
revelation of a feeling that the poet
believes to be interior and personal which the
reader recognizes as his own.
- Salvatore Quasimodo
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The
words never
quite equal the experience behind them.
- Charles Simic
The poetic myths are
dead; and the poetic image,
which is the myth of the individual, reigns in their stead.
- C. Day Lewis
Of our conflicts with others we make
rhetoric;
of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.
- William Butler Yeats
A poet can survive everything but a
misprint.
- Oscar Wilde
Speech framed ... to
be heard for its own sake and interest
even over and above its interest of meaning.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
Some editors are
failed writers, but so are most writers.
- T. S. Eliot
Not philosophy, after
all, not humanity, just the sheer joyous
power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.
- Max Beerbohm
No man was ever yet a great poet, without
being at the same
time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and
the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts,
human passions, emotions, language.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one
word wrong
at the end of a joke, you have lost the whole thing.
- W.S. Merwin
Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.
- Carl Sandburg
Write drunk, revise
sober.
- Miller Williams
Great poetry is always
written by somebody
straining to go beyond what he can do.
- Stephen Spender
The degree in which a
poet's imagination dominates reality is,
in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
- George Santayana
We can only approach the gods through
poetry.
- Thomas Moore
There's no money in
poetry, but then
there's no poetry in money, either.
- Robert Graves
I am still at the mercy of words, though
sometimes now, knowing
a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them
slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then,
which they appear to enjoy.
- Dylan Thomas
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in
life.
- William Hazlitt
"Therefore"
is a word the poet must not know.
- André Gide
Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a
thing which
enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze
it with itself, but with it's subject.
- John Keats
Poetry ... should
strike the reader as a wording of his own
highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
- John Keats
Yet not too like, yet not so
like to be
Too near, too clear, saving a little to endow
Our feigning with the strange unlike, whence springs
The difference that heavenly pity brings.
- Wallace Stevens, To
the One of Fictive Music
A poet who makes use of a worse word instead
of a better,
because the former fits the rhyme or the measure, though
it weakens the sense, is like a jeweler, who cuts a diamond
into a brilliant, and diminishes the weight to make it shine more.
- Horace Walpole
Language that tells
us, through a more or less emotional reaction,
something that can not be said.
- E. A. Robinson
A musician must make music, an artist must
paint,
a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace
with himself. What one can be, one must be.
- Abraham Maslow
Genius is mainly an
affair of energy, and poetry is mainly
an affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is
characterized by energy may well be imminent in poetry.
- Matthew Arnold
Poetry, in the past,
was the center of our society, but with
modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile
of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind.
- Octavio Paz
He who draws noble delights from sentiments
of poetry
is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
- George Sand
The gap between verse
and poetry is enormous.
Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower.
- Michael Longley
A poem is an instant
of lucidity in which
the entire organism participates.
- Charles Simic
Each memorable verse
of a true poet has
two or three times the written content.
- Alfred de Musset
Poetry isn't written
from the idea down. It's written from
the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from
what your teacher taught you to do in school.
- Margaret Atwood
Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle,
cracked ice crunching in pails,
the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales,
the sweet pea that has run wild ...
- Boris Pasternak
The two most engaging
powers of an author are to
make new things familiar, and familiar things new.
- Samuel Johnson
Poetry which owes no
man anything, owes nevertheless one debt --
an image of the world in which men can again believe.
- Archibald
MacLeish
Poetry is a language
pared down to its essentials.
- Ezra Pound
It is the timber of
poetry that wears most surely,
and there is no timber that has not strong roots
among the clay and worms.
- John Synge
Poetry is language at its most distilled and
most powerful.
- Rita Dove
Poetic power is great,
strong as a primitive instinct;
it has its own unyielding rhythms in itself and
breaks out as out of mountains.
- Ranier Maria Rilke
"Superb online directory compiled by
Michael P. Garofalo featuring
all the best concrete poetry sites on the WWW."
Christina Conrad, Performance
Poetry Websites
Poetry allows one to speak with a
power
that is not granted by our culture.
- Linda McCarriston
Poetry is a deal of
joy and pain and wonder,
with a dash of the dictionary.
- Kahlil Gibran
Just because your
voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't
mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
- Edward R. Murrow
As I get older, I recognize
that my thinking about poetry may or
may not have anything actively to do with my actual work as a
poet. This strikes me as no thing cynically awry but rather
seems again instance of that hapless or possibly happy fact,
we do not as humans seem necessarily aware of what we are
physically or psychically doing at all!
- Robert Creeley
Quotes about Gardening and the Green Way
Poetry begins in
delight and ends in wisdom.
- Robert Frost
What line breaks add
to prose prosody is a connection between eye
and ear which emphasizes the nature of the language by ... creating
units of intent and emphasis, and by contouring the meloding pitch
changes in the narrative-line.
- Diane Wakoski
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of
the world.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is nearer to
vital truth than history.
- Plato
As a tool of
cognition, poetry beats any existing form of analysis
(a) because it pares down our reality to its linguistic essentials,
whose interplay, be it clash or fusion, yields epiphany or revelation,
and (b) because it exploits the rhythmic and euphonic properties
of the language that in themselves are revelatory.
- Joseph Brodsky
Assist me some
extemporal god of rhyme, for I am sure
I shall turn sonneteer. Devise, wit, write, pen; for I am
for whole volumes in folio.
- William Shakespeare
The art which uses
words as both speech and song to reveal
the realities that the senses record, the feelings salute, the
mind perceives, and the shaping imagination orders.
- Babettes Deutsch
A
poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what
could or would happen either probably or inevitably .... For
this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious
than history, because poetry tends to give general truths
while history gives particular facts.
- Aristotle
The crown of
literature is poetry. It is its end and aim.
It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the
achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of
prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
- William Sumerset Maugham
As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and
the vine a gourd,
man bears a poem, either spoken or done.
- Henry David Thoreau
Poets are soldiers that liberate words from
the
steadfast possession of definition.
- Eli Khamarov
A poet's autobiography is his poetry.
Anything else is just a footnote.
- Yevgeny Yentushenko
What is a poem but a
hazardous attempt at self-understanding?
It is the deepest part of an autobiography.
- Robert Penn Warren
A poem is a construction of inner space.
Language is to inner space as light is to material space.
- Sven
Birkerts
Poetry is the
suggestion, by the imagination,
of noble grounds for noble emotions.
- John Rushkin
A poet's work is to
name the unnamable, to point
at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the
world, and stop it from going to sleep.
- Salman Rushdie
The artist does not tinker with the
universe, he recreates it
out of his own experience and understanding of life.
- Henry Miller
Poetic language honors polarities. We
use the language of
poetry to provide the many levels of feeling, facets of knowing,
simultaneously, so we can examine them and move forward.
- Peggy Osna Heller
With this pen I take in hand my selves
and with these dead disciples I will grapple.
Though rain curses the window
let the poem be made.
- Anne Sexton
Bring me all of your
dreams,
You dreamers...
Bring me all of your Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.
- Langston Hughes
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.
- T.S. Eliot
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty
in words.
- Edgar Allan Poe
There’s a sameness
about American poetry that I don’t
think represents the whole people. It represents a poetry
of the moment, a poetry of evasion, and I have problems
with this. I believe poetry has always been political, long
before poets had to deal with the page and white
space . . . it’s natural.
- Yusef Komunyakaa
You will find poetry nowhere unless you
bring some with you.
- Joubert
The joy of poetry is
that it will wait for you. Novels don't wait for you.
Characters change. But poetry will wait.
- Sonia Sanchez
I think many people
(like myself) prefer to read poetry mixed with prose;
it gives you more to go by; the conventions of poetry have been getting
far off from normal life, so that to have a prose bridge makes
reading poetry seem more natural.
- William Empson
Poetry is either something that lives like
fire inside you - like music
to the musician . . . or else it is nothing, an empty, formalised bore
around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Poetry is the language
in which man explores his own amazement.
- Christopher Fry
The poet doesn't
invent. He listens.
- Jean Cocteau
A good poem tells us a
truth about the world;
a bad poem tells us a truth about the author.
- Larry
Mature art, I think, emerges
when there's a certain balance
of tensions, when there's neither neurotic prostration nor
cold rationality, but an aura of energy and a drive to grasp
personal "truths" still emerging into perception.
To grasp and to shape them.
- Earle Birney
Poetry is of so subtle
a spirit, that in the pouring out
of one language into another it will evaporate.
- John Denham
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime
of standing out in
thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
- Randall Jarell
Nature scarcely ever gives us the very
best;
for that we must have recourse to art.
- Baltasar
Gracian
When ideas fail, words
come in very handy.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic
energy:
the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the
solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.
- George Eliot
Poetry expresses the idea;
song regulates the sounds;
dance enlivens the attitudes; these three have their
principal in man's heart, and it is only the later that
musical instruments lend their help.
- Li Chi, Record of Rites
In the mouth of a
competent speaker, the poem is suddenly
whole and alive, a spirit. It transcends the austere silence
of the page. If only for a moment, all chariot and whirlwind.
- John Pach
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.
- Niels Bohr
The nonmimetic
character of language is thus, in a certain way,
the opportunity and the condition for poetry to exist. Poetry
exists only to "renumerate" in other words, to repair and
compensate for the "defect of languages."
- Gerard Genette
As to the pure mind all things are
pure,
so to the poetic mind all things are poetical.
- Henry W. Longfellow
Poetry is the music of
the soul, and,
above all, of great and feeling souls.
- Voltaire
Poetry is plucking at
the heartstrings, and making music with them.
- Dennis Gabor
I have nothing to say
and I am saying it and that is poetry.
- John Cage
The true philosopher
and the true poet are one,
and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which
is beauty, is the aim of both.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Contemporary poetry
... tries to transform the sign back into meaning:
its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the
meaning of things themselves. This is why it clouds the language,
increases
as much as it can the abstractness of the concept and the arbitrariness
of the sign and stretches to the limit the link between signifier and signified.
- Barthes
I write first drafts
with only the good angel on my shoulder, the voice
that approves of everything I write. This voice does'nt ask questions
like, Is this good? Is this a poem? Are you a poet? I keep this voice
at a distance, letting only the good angel whisper to me: Trust yourself.
You can't worry a poem into existence.
- Georgia Heard
The poet's eye in a
fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven
to earth, from earth to heaven; and, as imagination bodies forth
the forms of things unknown, the poets pen turns them to shapes,
and gives airy nothing a local habitation and a name.
- William Shakespeare
A poem is energy
transferred from where the poet got it,
by way of the poem itself, all the way over to the reader.
- Charles Olson
A true poet does not bother to be
poetical.
Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
- Jean Cocteau
Everywhere I go, I
find a poet has been there before me.
- Sigmund Freud
Those who are not very concerned with art
want poems or pictures
to record for them something they already know - as one might
want a picture of a place he loves.
- George Oppen
A poem is a verbal
artifact which must be as skillfully
and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcycle.
- W. H. Auden
Poetry, even when
apparently most fantastic,
is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt,
in a sense, against actuality.
- James Joyce
You don't have to suffer to be a poet.
Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
- John Ciardi
Poetry is ... the
physical enactment of a process
of knowing by means of language.
- Mark Doty
Poetry is a mirror
which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
- Percy Shelley
We learn to treasure words that people call
us;
we learn to live by words that hurt. We cannot toss
them aside, so in time they become our dignity.
- Mark Doty
Such souls,
Whose sudden visitations daze the world,
Vanish like lightning, but they leave behind
A voice that in the distance far away
Wakens the slumbering ages.
- Henry Taylor
You arrive at truth
through poetry;
I arrive at poetry through truth.
- Joubert
The worst fate of a poet is to be
admired
without being understood.
- Jean Cocteau
With this pen I take
in hand my selves
and with these dead disciples I will grapple.
Though rain curses the window
let the poem be made.
- Anne Sexton
It is the job of
poetry to clean up our word-clogged
reality by creating silences around things.
- Stephen Mallarme
I never find words right away. Poems
for me always begin
with images and rhythms, shapes, feelings, forms, dances
in the back of my mind.
- Gary Snyder
My poetry, I should
think, has become the way of
my giving out what music is within me.
- Countee Cullen
Poetry presents the
thing in order to convey the feeling.
It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the
feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects
with the thing the feeling shows in the words.
- Wei T'ai
Genuine poetry can
communicate before it is understood.
- T.S. Eliot
Poetry must have something in it that is
barbaric, vast and wild.
- Denis Diderot
Poetry proceeds from
the totality of man, sense, imagination,
intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
- Jacques Maritain
Publishing a volume of
verse is like dropping a rose petal
down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
- Don Marquis
I have never started a
poem yet whose end I knew.
Writing a poem is discovering.
- Robert Frost
The writing of a poem
is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft.
You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.
- James Fenton
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
- Carl Sandburg
Cuttings: Short Poems by Michael P. Garofalo
Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and
blooded with
emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
- Paul Engle
I don't look at poetry
as closed works. I feel
they're going on all the time in my head and
I occasionally snip off a length.
- John Ashbery
Most people ignore
most poetry because
most poetry ignores most people.
- Adrian Mitchell
Nothing whips my blood
like verse.
- Willam Carlos Williams
No good poem, however
confessional it may be, is just self-expression.
Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster.
- C. Day Lewis
The poet ... may be
used as a barometer,
but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
- Lionel Trilling
There are two ways of
disliking poetry, one way is to dislike it,
the other is to read Pope.
- Oscar Wilde
By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives
us an
opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings
on this planet and what we mean to each other.
- Rita Dove
When a thing has been
said and well, have no scruple.
Take it and copy it.
- Anatole France
"Mike Garofalo's Poetry Notebook
pages have some of the best and up-to-date
haiku weblinkage available. These are well organized into alphabetical order, author
order, haiku resources, teaching haiku (by age group!!!), classic haijin, and
more.
This is an all-time best site for haijin! *****
A great place for gardeners, haijin and philosophers to wander
for hours; an ongoing act of creativity."
- Debra Woolard Bender, Paper
Lanterns
Poetry amounts to
arranging words with the greatest specific
gravity in the most effective and externally inevitable sequence.
- Joseph Brodsky
Ultimately,
literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you
are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
- Gabriel García Márquez
Language ...is an infinitude of used or
potential poems
waiting to be molded into new realities.
- Friedrich
Links and References
As the Poet Said. Edited by Tony Curtis. Dublin, Poetry Ireland.
Cuttings:
Haiku and Short Poems 400K
Esoterica
13K.
Poetry: Definitions, Theories, Observations, Quips Part I
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo. Quotes about Poetry.
Includes many links. 70K.
Poetry: Definitions, Theories, Observations, Quips Part II
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo. Quotes about Poetry.
60K.
PoetryJones.org
12K
Quotations about Poetry and
Poets 14K
Quotations and
Famous Quotes Dictionary
Quotes about Poetry Part
I 70K
Quotes about Poetry Part
II 60K
Quotes for Gardeners. Over 2,500 quotations organized by 130
topics. 3MB
Quotes for Poets E-mail Newsletter Homepage
Quotes for Poets from Poets 4K
Some
Literary Criticism Quotes 100K+
Haiku
and Short Poems
Links, References, Guides
Short
Poems by Michael P. Garofalo
Quatrains,
Couplets, Haiku, Free Verse, Fragments
Quotes
for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Clichés, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes Arranged by Over 130 Topics
Many of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
I Welcome Your Comments,
Ideas and Suggestions
E-mail Mike Garofalo in Red Bluff, California
A Short Biography of
Mike Garofalo
Mike Garofalo's Poetry Notebook II
Quotes about Poetry Part I.
Cuttings: Short Poems and Haiku by Michael P. Garofalo
