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The courage of the poets is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
-Christopher Morley
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Poetry is the special medium of spiritual crazy wisdom, the form of expression that comes closest to creating a bridge between words and what is wordless.
-Wes ''Scoop'' Nisker
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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longer a poetical audience among the higher class of minds, that moral, political, and physical science have entirely withdrawn from poetry the attention of all whose attention is worth having; and that the poetical reading public being composed of the mere dregs of the intellectual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 blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
-Sylvia Plath
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Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.
-Plato
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With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
-Edgar Allan Poe
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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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A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.
-Jules Renard
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Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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From THE SONNETS TO ORPHEUS
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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From THE SONNETS TO ORPHEUS
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.
-Frederick William Robertson
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Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.
-Joseph Roux
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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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Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
-Carl Sandburg
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Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the sky.
-Carl Sandburg
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I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself.
-Carl Sandburg
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The greatest poem is not that which is most skillfully constructed, but that in which there is the most poetry.
-L. Schefer
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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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Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
-Sir Walter Scott
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Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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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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Books about Poetry
