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"A poet is someone who is astonished by everything."
-Anon.
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I don't see how poetry can ever be easy... Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it.
-Edward Abbey
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It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
-Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the Sun, 1951
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I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a "suspension of belief." A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.
-W. H. Auden
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It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
-W. H. Auden, Foreword, "The Dyer's Hand," 1962.
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"I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world."
-Russell Baker
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"Any healthy man can go without food for two days -- but not without poetry."
-Charles Baudelaire
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The poet is like the prince of clouds
Who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer;
Exiled on the ground in the midst of jeers,
His giant wings prevent him from walking.
-Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal. L'Albatros, st. 4
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People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I’m desperately trying to do is to get students to talk to themselves as though they are indeed themselves, and not someone else.
-Harold Bloom
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One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.
-Billy Collins, "New York Times"
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The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.
-Salvador Dali
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If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
-Emily Dickinson
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All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.
-Lord Alfred Douglas, Collected Poems [1919]
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What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the relation of criticism to poetry in England (London: Faber and Faber, 1933, 1959), 130
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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. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, Philip Massinger (essay)
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Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you — like music to the musician... — or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their nots and explanations.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Highly important in poetry is Rhythm, but the word means merely 'flow,' so that rhythm belongs to prose as well as to poetry. Good rhythm is merely a pleasing succession of sounds. Meter, the distinguishing formal mark of poetry and all verse, is merely rhythm which is regular in certain
fundamental respects, roughly speaking is rhythm in which the recurrence of stressed syllables or of feet with definite time-values is regular. There is no proper connection either in spelling or in meaning between rhythm and rime (which is generally misspelled 'rhyme'). The adjective derived from
'rhythm' is 'rhythmical'; there is no adjective from 'rime' except 'rimed.' The word 'verse' in its general sense includes all writing in meter. Poetry is that verse which has real literary merit.
-Robert Huntington Fletcher, A History of English Literature
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"Poetry is what gets lost in translation."
-Robert Frost
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A poem begins with a lump in the throat, a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where the emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words."
-Robert Frost
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"A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland."
-Kahlil Gibran, "The Poet of Baalbek"
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The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.
-Allen Ginsberg
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Then this immensive cup
Of aromatic wine,
Catullus, I quaff up
To that terse muse of thine.
-Robert Herrick, To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses
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The poet is born with the capacity of arranging words in such a way that something of the quality of the graces and inspirations he has received can make itself felt to other human beings in the white spaces, so to speak, between the lines of his verse. This is a great and precious gift; but if the poet remains content with his gift, if he persists in worshipping the beauty in art and nature without going on to make himself capable, through selflessness, of apprehending Beauty as it is in the divine Ground, then he is only an idolater.
-Aldous Huxley
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Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity --it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
-John Keats
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There is no peace to be taken
With poets who are young,
For they worry about the wars to be fought
and the songs that must be sung.
-Joyce Kilmer, "Old Poets" [Kilmer died at the age of 32 in WW I]
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Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
-Thomas Babington Macaulay
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"Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo."
-Don Marquis
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The truth, I am convinced, is that there is no longer a poetical audience among the higher class of minds, that moral, political, and physical science have entirely withdrawn from poetry the attention of all whose attention is worth having; and that the poetical reading public being composed of the mere dregs of the intellectual community, the most sufficing passport to their favour must rest on the mixture of a little easily-intelligible portion of mawkish sentiment with an absolute negation of reason and knowledge.
-Thomas Love Peacock, [letter to Shelley], December 4, 1820
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The object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object, Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose.
-Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Composition
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"Vigny, more secret
As if in his tower of ivory, retired before noon."
N.B.: Vigny refers to Comte de Vigny, who locked himself in an ivory tower to work without the influences of man and desire.
-Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Pensees d'Aout
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Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
-Carl Sandburg
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We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.
-Tom Schulman, Professor Keating (Robin Williams) in "Dead Poet's Society"
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And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous,
He must die a little death each morning,
He must swallow his toad and study his vomit
as Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval.
-Delmore Schwartz
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"Draw a crazy picture,
Write a nutty poem,
Sing a mumble-gumble song,
Whistle through your comb.
Do a loony-goony dance
'Cross the kitchen floor,
Put something silly in the world
That ain't been there before."
-Shel Silverstein
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"Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them."
-Charles Simic
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I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
-Socrates
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I love Beethoven, especially the poems.
-Ringo Starr
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"Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world."
-Wallace Stevens, Adagia
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"Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet."
-Wallace Stevens, Adagia
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You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.
-Dylan Thomas
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A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.
-Dylan Thomas
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I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
-John Updike
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A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
-Paul Ambroise Valery
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May I be permitted to add a few words with regard to the poetry? Then I will speak to those who are judges thereof, with all freedom and unreserve. To these I may say, with-out offence, 1. In these hymns there is no doggerel ; no botches ; nothing put in to patch up the rhyme ; no feeble expletives. 2. Here is nothing turgid or bombast, on the one hand, or low and creeping, on the other. 3. here are no cant expressions ; no words without meaning. Those who impute this to us, know not what they say. We talk common sense, both in prose and verse, and use no words but in a fixed and determinate sense. 4. Here are, allow me to say, both the purity, the strength, and the elegance of the English language; and, at the same time, the utmost simplicity and plainness, suited to every capacity. Lastly, I desire men of taste to judge, (these are the only competent judges,) whether there be not in some of the following hymns the true spirit of poetry, such as cannot be acquired by art and labour, but must be the gift of nature. By labour, a man may become a tolerable imitator of Spenser, Shakspeare, or Milton ; and may heap together pretty compound epithets, as pale-eyed, meek-eyed, and the like ; but unless he be born a poet, he will never attain the genuine spirit of poetry.
-John Wesley, preface to the 1780 Hymn Book: A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists, October 20, 1779
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At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer or Shakspeare. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd—Waller’s “Go, lovely rose,” or Lovelace’s lines “to Lucusta”—the quaint conceits of the old French bards, and the like. Of power he seems to have a gentleman’s admiration—but in his inmost heart the grandest attribute of God and Poets is always subordinate to the octaves, conceits, polite kinks, and verbs.
-Walt Whitman, Emerson’s Books (the Shadows of Them), 1892
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I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.
-Thornton Wilder, attributed
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Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.
-William Wordsworth, from Preface to Lyrical Ballads
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The scientist has marched in and taken the place of the poet. But one day somebody will find the solution to the problems of the world and remember, it will be a poet, not a scientist.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
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Books about Poetry
