 
|
Poetry is life distilled.
-Gwendolyn Brooks
|
|
|
|
As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
|
|
|
|
Poetry should only occupy the idle.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
|
|
|
|
I by no means rank poetry high in the scale of intelligence --this may look like affectation but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
|
|
|
|
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
-Raymond Chandler
|
|
|
|
Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feelings, reviews the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the springtime of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human mature, by vivid delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life.
-William Ellery Channing
|
|
|
|
Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth -- the true poet is very near the oracle.
-Edwin Hubbell Chapin
|
|
|
|
Little do such men know the toil, the pains, the daily, nightly racking of the brains, to range the thoughts, the matter to digest, to cull fit phrases, and reject the rest.
-Charles Churchill
|
|
|
|
Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for.
-Jean Cocteau
|
|
|
|
Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.
-Jean Cocteau
|
|
|
|
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; --poetry = the best words in the best order.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
|
|
|
|
That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
|
|
|
|
To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.
-Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
|
|
|
|
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"
|
|
|
|
It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my poems are competing.
-e. e. (Edward Estlin) cummings
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those we have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things.
-Emily Dickinson
|
|
|
|
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
-Denis Diderot
|
|
|
|
The job of the poet is to render the world -- to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
-Mark Van Doren
|
|
|
|
All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.
-Lord Alfred Douglas
Collected Poems 1919
|
|
|
|
We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.
-Elizabeth Drew
|
|
|
|
Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.
-Andrea Dworkin
|
|
|
|
Everything is poetry. It's just a matter of whether or not you can see it.
-James Dye
|
|
|
|
Creative forms is really where it's at for contemporary poetry.
-James Dye
|
|
Books about Poetry
