Poetry Quotes - Page 8

• Always be a poet, even in prose.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Writing, Literature, Poetic

  Charles Baudelaire, Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden (2006). “Intimate Journals”, p.108, Courier Corporation

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• Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend.

  Stephen Burt

  Children, Parent, Literature

  Stephen Burt (2009). “Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry”, Graywolf Press

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• 

  I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Love, Valentines Day, Cute Boyfriend

  1850 Poems,'Sonnets from the Portuguese', sonnet 43.

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• Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

  Denis Diderot

  Poetry Is, Barbaric

  Denis Diderot (1966). “Selected Writings”, New York : Macmillan

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• Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Love, Inspirational, Life

  Rainer Maria Rilke, John J. L. Mood (1994). “Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations”, p.31, W. W. Norton & Company

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• My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.

  Laurie Anderson

  Dream, Writing, Epic

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• Wheresoe'er I turn my view,
  All is strange, yet nothing new:
  Endless labor all along,
  Endless labor to be wrong:
  Phrase that Time has flung away;
  Uncouth words in disarray,
  Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet,
  Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.

  Samuel Johnson

  Views, Phrases, Odes

  Tobias George Smollett, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith (1810). “The Poetical Works of Doctors Smollett, Johnson, and Goldsmith”, p.113

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• Poetry is like fish: if it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's bad; and if you're not certain, try it on the cat.

  Osbert Sitwell

  Writing, Cat, Trying

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• We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

  John Fowles

  Writing, Reading Poetry, Poet

  1969 The French Lieutenant's Woman, ch.19.

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• Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

  T. S. Eliot

  Communication, Writing, Understanding

  1929 Dante.

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• Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it.

  Rumi

  Beautiful, Giving, Illusion

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• There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.

  Robert Graves

  Money, Writing, Wealth

  Robert Graves, Frank L. Kersnowski (1989). “Conversations with Robert Graves”, p.71, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Writing, Mind, Records

  'A Defence of Poetry' (written 1821, published 1840)

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• The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Light, May, Myth

  1958 In the Saturday Review, 22 Mar.

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• Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

  Paul Engle

  Ideas, Reading Poetry, Skins

  New York Times, February 17, 1957.

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• Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur.

  Diane Ackerman

  Past, Telescopes, Blur

  Diane Ackerman (1999). “Deep Play”, Random House Incorporated

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• I said, the poets are there
  I hear them singing and lying
  around their round table
  and around me still.

  Anne Sexton

  Lying, Singing, Tables

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• You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.

  John Adams

  Life And Love, Liberty, Pockets

  Letter to John Quincy Adams, 14 May 1781

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• A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.

  Margaret Atwood

  Ignorance, Dignity, Threatening

  "Margaret Atwood : Writing Philosophy". Waterstone's Poetry Lecture, Delivered At Hay On Wye, canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca. June 1995.

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• Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Language, Poetry Is

  Stanley Kunitz, Kent P. Ljungquist (2013). “Conversations with Stanley Kunitz”, p.69, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is power.

  Gregory Corso

  Power, Waiting, Standing Alone

  Gregory Corso, Bill Morgan (2003). “An Accidental Autobiography: The Selected Letters of Gregory Corso”, p.303, New Directions Publishing

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• The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

  Edith Sitwell

  Men, Speak, Forgotten

  "The Beacon Book of Quotations by Women" by Rosalie Maggio, (p. 247), 1992.

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• Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

  Thomas Gray

  Poetic, Breathe, Gray

  'The Progress of Poesy' (1757) l. 110

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• It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life.... [ellipsis in source] Illness, old age, and death--subjects as ancient as humanity--these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak.

  Louise Bogan

  Life, Writing, Humanity

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• Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Heart, Oracles, Utterance

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