 
|
I don't write poetry with the intention of making someone sad but rather to illustrate my own feelings and ideas.
-James Dye
|
|
|
|
She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me written by an Italian poet from the 13th century and every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.
-Bob Dylan
|
|
|
|
A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.
-Max Eastman
|
|
|
|
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
-Umberto Eco
|
|
|
|
Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: --in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.
-George Eliot
|
|
|
|
When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
|
|
|
|
We must believe that emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not recollected and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is tranquil only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
|
|
|
|
It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry --That is a life.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
|
|
|
|
I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
|
|
|
|
Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
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)
|
|
|
|
It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
|
|
|
|
Only poetry inspires poetry.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
|
|
|
|
Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
|
|
|
|
Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
|
|
|
|
Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
|
|
|
|
Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
-Paul Engle
|
|
|
|
Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.
-George Farquhar
|
|
|
|
The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.
-James Fenton
|
|
|
|
A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.
-Eugene Field
|
|
|
|
Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
|
|
|
|
Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
-Robert Fitzgerald
|
|
|
|
Of all great poems, love is the absolute and essential foundation.
-C. Fitzhugh
|
|
|
|
All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
-Gustave Flaubert
|
|
Books about Poetry
