Poetry Quotes - Page 39

• Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering--I mean remembering in words--what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives.

  Mary Oliver

  Art, Mean, Touching

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.106, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  America, Track, Able

  Yevgeny Zamyatin (2010). “We: Introduction by Will Self”, p.59, Random House

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A poet must have died as a man before he is worth anything as a poet.

  Christian Morgenstern

  Men, Poet, Died

  4 Copy quote

• Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Sculpture, Painting, Moments

  Walter Savage Landor (1836). “Pericles and Aspasia”, p.149

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Though my verse but roam the air And murmur in the trees, You may discern a purpose there, As in music of the bees.

  Alfred Austin

  Air, Tree, Bees

  Alfred Austin (1885). “At the Gate of the Convent: And Other Poems”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Tis true among fields and woods I sing, Aloof from cities--that my poor strains Were born, like the simple flowers you bring, In English meadows and English lanes.

  Alfred Austin

  Flower, Simple, Cities

  Alfred Austin (1896). “Days of the Year: A Poetic Calendar from the Works of A. Austin”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne.

  Umberto Eco

  Teenage, Acne, Formal

  "Novelist Umberto Eco dies at 84; wrote 'Name of the Rose' and 'Foucault's Pendulum'" by Carolyn Kellogg and Jill Leovy, www.latimes.com. February 19, 2016.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, — the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Elements, Saturn, Made

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1866). “Kavanagh. Driftwood”, p.365

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests.

  John Dryden

  Checks, Priests, Satirical

  John Dryden (2016). “The Works of John Dryden, Vol.2: Top English Literature”, p.292, VM eBooks

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Men of real talents in Arms have commonly approved themselves patrons of the liberal arts and friends to the poets, of their own as well as former times. In some instances by acting reciprocally, heroes have made poets, and poets heroes.

  George Washington

  Art, Real, Hero

  George Washington, Fred Anderson, Philander D. Chase (2004). “George Washington Remembers: Reflections on the French and Indian War”, p.92, Rowman & Littlefield

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned.

  Emma Lazarus

  Simple, Impassioned, Sensuous

  Emma Lazarus (2002). “Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems and Other Writings”, p.234, Broadview Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Profound, May, Vivid

  Edgar Allan Poe (2017). “Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Essays, Literary Studies, Criticism, Cryptography & Autography, Translations, Letters and Other Non-Fiction Works: The Philosophy of Composition, The Rationale of Verse, The Poetic Principle, Old English Poetry, Maelzel's Chess Player, Eureka, The Literati of New York, Fifty Suggestions, Exordium, Marginalia…”, p.52, e-artnow

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Melancholy is ... the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Tone, Melancholy

  Edgar Allan Poe (2016). “Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works”, p.148, Lulu.com

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.

  Herbert Spencer

  Light, White, Soul

  Herbert Spencer (1871). “Essays: Moral, Political and Aesthetic”, p.31

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.

  Antonin Artaud

  War, Drug, Poetic

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.122, Grove Press

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We're involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We're always going to need it.

  Edward Hirsch

  Essentials, Needs, Use

  10 Copy quote

• A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damages.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Pain, Ice, Speech

  6 Copy quote

• Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.

  Gao Xingjian

  Writing, Making Love, Know How

  5 Copy quote

• Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Grief, Joy, Tolls

  Jane Hirshfield (2015). “Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World”, p.178, Knopf

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• I approach poetry and spirituality like literary nitroglycerin -- a little can do a lot and you better damn well be careful with it.

  Craig Johnson

  Littles, Spirituality, Damn

  Craig Johnson (2004). “The Cold Dish: A Longmire Mystery”, p.277, Penguin

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.

  Roberto Bolano

  Games, Poetry Is, One Thing

  12 Copy quote

• Joy is a part of my process. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that poetry, as a practice, necessitates a sense of joy. It's exhilarating to come into contact with the things we write into being. And a real sense of play and abandon – even when we are relying on hard-won technique, and even when the aim is deadly serious. How often do we get the excuse to stop, think, and then stop thinking altogether and try to listen to what sits behind our outside of our thoughts? Poets are lucky.

  Tracy K. Smith

  Real, Writing, Thinking

  "Interview with Tracy K. Smith – 'Poets are Lucky'". Interview with Michael Klein, blog.pshares.org. May 30, 2012.

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Once I started writing all the time and interacting with poets, I made a conscious decision to identify myself as a poet. It's funny how much a single word can provide focus and direction. As soon as I claimed that identity, I started clearing more and more space for poetry in my life and applying poetic tools to other areas of my life. The world became a different place, and I witnessed it through different kinds of eyes.

  Tracy K. Smith

  Eye, Writing, Space

  9 Copy quote

• Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.

  Tracy K. Smith

  Events, Moments

  11 Copy quote

• the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Falling In Love, Men

  T. S. Eliot (1998). “The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays”, p.127, Courier Corporation

  4 Copy quote

  Show source