Poetry Quotes - Page 35

• If it doesn't work horizontally as prose... it probably won't work any better vertically pretending to be poetry.

  Robert Breault

  Pretending, Prose, Ifs

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• What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?

  W. H. Auden

  Professors, Poetry Is

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• I hate French poetry. What measured glitter!

  Israel Zangwill

  Hate, Glitter, I Hate

  Israel Zangwill (1908). “Dreamers of the Ghetto”, p.560, Library of Alexandria

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• And take back ill-polished stanzas to the anvil.

  Horace

  Anvils, Ill, Polished

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• The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.

  John Ciardi

  Reading, Writing, Determined

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• A poet cannot be a Party member ... without paying the price.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Party, Poet, Members

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• The reader who is illuminated is, in a real sense, the poem.

  H. M. Tomlinson

  Real, Reader

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• Ever been kidnapped by a poet if i were a poet i'd kidnap you put you in my phrases and meter.

  Nikki Giovanni

  Phrases, Meter, Kidnapped

  Nikki Giovanni (2009). “Love Poems”, p.19, Harper Collins

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• I had rather be a Kitten, and cry mew, Than one of these same Meeter Ballad-mongers: I had rather heare a Brazen Candlestick turn'd, Or a dry Wheele grate on the Axle-tree, And that would set my teeth nothing an edge, Nothing so much, as mincing Poetrie.

  William Shakespeare

  Tree, Teeth, Dry

  William Shakespeare (2013). “Renaissance Acting Editions: The First Part of Henry the Fourth, with the Life and Death of HENRY Sirnamed HOT-SPURRE [King Henry IV, Part 1]”, p.147, Demitra Papadinis

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• It is vain for the sober man to knock at poesy's door.

  Plato

  Men, Doors, Sober

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• I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.

  John Updike

  Years, Four, Muse

  New York Times, April 7, 1968.

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• Each man has his own batch of poems.

  Saul Bellow

  Men

  Saul Bellow (1976). “Herzog”, Viking Adult

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• The fact that there are so many weak, poor and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our rebels to the horrible squareness of our institutions, the idiocy of power, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough. The poems and novels of these same rebellious spirits, and their theoretical statements, are grimy and gritty and very boring too, besides being nonsensical, and it is evident by now that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either.

  Saul Bellow

  Art, America, Facts

  Saul Bellow (2015). “There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction”, p.149, Penguin

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• I don't see how poetry can ever be easy... Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it.

  Edward Abbey

  Real, Blood, Sweat

  Edward Abbey, David Petersen (2003). “Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey”, p.39, Big Earth Publishing

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• The poet is born with the capacity of arranging words in such a way that something of the quality of the graces and inspirations he has received can make itself felt to other human beings in the white spaces, so to speak, between the lines of his verse. This is a great and precious gift; but if the poet remains content with his gift, if he persists in worshipping the beauty in art and nature without going on to make himself capable, through selflessness, of apprehending Beauty as it is in the divine Ground, then he is only an idolater.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Inspiration, White

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• Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.

  W. H. Auden

  Art, People, Soup

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• What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.

  T. S. Eliot

  Mean, May, Forget

  T. S. Eliot (1986). “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England”, p.122, Harvard University Press

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• In most men there exists a poet who died young, whom the man survived.

  Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

  Men, He Man, Young

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• A poet is a painter of the soul.

  Isaac D'Israeli

  Soul, Poet, Painter

  An Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character, 1795.

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• Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

  George Santayana

  Long, Ancient, Muse

  George Santayana, Marianne S. Wokeck, Martin A. Coleman, James Gouinlock (2015). “The Life of Reason Or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Art, Volume VII, Book Four”, p.58, MIT Press

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• Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.

  Wallace Stevens

  Real, Perception, Degrees

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• A person born with an instinct for poverty.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Poverty, Instinct, Born

  Elbert Hubbard, Bert Hubbard (1923). “Selected writings of Elbert Hubbard: his mintage of wisdom, coined from a life of love, laughter and work”

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• Truth shines the brighter, clad in verse.

  Alexander Pope

  Shining, Verses, Brighter

  Jonathan Swift, John Arbuthnot, Alexander Pope, John Gay (1742). “Miscellanies. In Four Volumes”, p.212

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• At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer or Shakspeare. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd

  Walt Whitman

  Likes, Odd, Polish

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• I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Notebook, Thinking, Two

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