quotations about poetry
Poetry is another way of encouraging people to think and feel deeply about their own lives and their relationships to other people and other communities.
HANNAH ENSOR
"Poetry to fill the air at weekend festival", Tucson Sentinel, April 14, 2016
What is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding? It is the deepest part of autobiography.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
The New York Times, May 12, 1985
True poetry is not of earth,
'T is more of Heaven by its birth.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
"Parnassus", Cloudrifts at Twilight
Poets are the chemists of sentiment, for they analyze and purify it.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity.
AMY LOWELL
preface, Tendencies in Modern Poetry
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
interview, 2007
Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned.
EMMA LAZARUS
"Critic and Poet: An Apologue"
You'll find yourself going back to certain poems again and again. After all, they are only words on a page, but you go back because something that really matters to you is evoked in you by the words. And if somebody said to you, Well, what is it? or What do your favorite poems mean?, you may well be able to answer it, if you've been educated in a certain way, but I think you'll feel the gap between what you are able to say and why you go on reading.
ADAM PHILLIPS
The Paris Review, spring 2014
Some poems are like the Centaurs--a mingling of man and beast, and begotten of Ixion on a cloud.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
When people say that poetry is merely a luxury for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read much at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language -- and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers -- a language powerful enough to say how it is.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Guardian, November 14, 2008
The crown of literature is poetry.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Essays in Criticism, Second Series
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
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
On Writing Poetry
No doubt Plato's notion that poets should chant nothing but hymns to the Gods and praises of virtue is a little narrow and exacting, but if they are to sing songs worthy of themselves, and of mankind, they must be on the side of virtue and of the Gods.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013
So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
None knows the reason why this curse
Was sent on him, this love of making verse.
HORACE
Ars Poetica
Is poetry more important than politics? In a practical sense, probably not, but people have different perspectives and will place their values accordingly. I know I couldn't munch through metaphors if I was half-starved and shivering on the streets - though I'd probably give it a go. Still, as someone pointed out, a brew does taste better with a spoonful of sugar and a splash of semi-skimmed than with a dash of Dylan Thomas.
JADE CUTTLE
"A plate of poetry, please: Is poetry more important than politics?", Varsity Online, May 3, 2016