quotations about poetry
If the poet would avoid pepsis in his patients, his scalpel must be as clean as the surgeon's.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
T. S. ELIOT
The Sacred Wood
For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
No one ever expects poetry to sell.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
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
"A Birthday", Lyrical Poems
It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
T. S. ELIOT
Tradition and the Individual Talent
Poets are the most injurious romancers by which society is deluded; for they excite the feelings or the imagination to such an extent--creating superhuman excellences--that the dull realities of life, its frauds, its meanness, its falsehood, or even its truth, alike sicken and disgust.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
J. D. SALINGER
"Teddy"
Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Philosophy of Composition"
We do not reject the song that makes the blood dance faster through our veins, or the lyric that thrills us with its sensuous beauty, or the romantic tale that fills up some painful or languorous hour, or the ode that sometimes, lapping our spirits in forgetfulness or summer dreams, brings us welcome reprieve from life's "sore spell of toil." But our unstinted and undying gratitude we reserve for the poet who, finding us disconsolate, comforts us; who, finding us disheartened and ready to yield, sounds the note of advance for us; who, finding us recreant to our trust and disloyal to our aspirations, uncovers for us once more the ideal that has been temporarily obscured. It is he who stays our feet amid the whirling waters of temptation; who sets the stars of faith and love and hope in our benighted sky, and who whispers to us in our lonely and nerveless moments of despair the heartening message of God and immortality.
FRANK CUMMINS LOCKWOOD
Robert Browning
There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
Poets' food is love and fame.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"An Exhortation"
You have to write a poem the way you ride a horse--you have to know what to do with it. You have to be in charge of a horse or it will eat all day--you'll never get back to the barn. But if you tell the horse how to be a horse, if you force it, the horse will probably break a leg. The horse and rider have to be together.
JACK GILBERT
The Paris Review, fall/winter 2005
Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.
CHARLES DICKENS
The Pickwick Papers
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
JEAN COCTEAU
attributed, Jean Cocteau and the French Scene
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
"Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III", L'art romantique
Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral; and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans, especially, have patronized this happy idea; and we Bostonians, very especially have developed it in full. We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true Poetic dignity and force; but the simple fact is, that, would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls, we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem--this poem per se--this poem which is a poem and nothing more--this poem written solely for the poem's sake.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Poetic Principle"
Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck,
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck.
JOHN DRYDEN
Abaslom and Achitophel