POETRY QUOTES VI

quotations about poetry

There is no true poet in whom fancy is not close akin to faith.

JOHN C. BAILEY

The Claims of French Poetry

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The poem that says "I love you" is the little black cocktail dress, the classic thing that everyone would like to have written one of.

JAMES FENTON

BBC Radio, October 4, 1994

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The emperor would prefer the poet to keep away from politics, the emperor's domain, so that he can manage things the way he likes.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Conjunctions, Fall 1991

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Poetry is never a sensible choice on financial grounds. Burglary beats poetry, when it comes to making money.

GARRISON KEILLOR

"Does love have to be a five-alarm fire?", Salon, July 15, 1998

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Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you--like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist--or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

letter to "Scottie" Fitzgerald, August 3, 1940

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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

Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World

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O gracious God! how far have we
Profaned thy heavenly gift of poesy!

JOHN DRYDEN

To the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killegrew

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No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

ALFRED AUSTIN

The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry

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

JOHN ADAMS

letter to John Quincy Adams, May 14, 1781

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Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.

ANTONIN ARTAUD

The Theater and Its Double

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The poet's is the highest type of character: other men dwell in the conventional--he chiefly abides in the universal.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought

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Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.

GLEN DUNCAN

I, Lucifer

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Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.

CHARLES SIMIC

Dime-Store Alchemy

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Poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

MARY OLIVER

A Poetry Handbook

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One of the current great problems in the world is fundamentalism of every kind -- political, spiritual -- and poetry is an antidote to fundamentalism. Poetry is about the clarities that you find when you don't simplify. Poetry is about complexity, nuance, subtlety. Poems also create larger fields of possibility. The imagination is limitless, so even when a person is confronted with an unchangeable outer circumstance, one thing poems give you is the sense that there's always, still, a changeability, a malleability, of inner circumstance. That's the beginning of freedom.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

"How can poems transform the world? A chat with poet Jane Hirshfield.", Washington Post, May 13, 2015


Joyous or bereaved, poetry is the ink and paper realm of emotion.

MAGGIE GRIMASON

"The Province of the Heart", Alibi, April 28, 2016


I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to.

MAYA ANGELOU

Facebook post, October 4, 2012

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I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action. And so his mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, but it is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you're different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference.

ANNE CARSON

The Paris Review, fall 2004

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A true poet comes among us only once in a generation, sometimes not once in a century, and ... certain civilized nations never produce a great poet. We suffer from dearth of poets, not from lack of love for poetry.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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A poet does not work by square or line.

WILLIAM COWPER

Conversation

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