 
|
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
-Charles Simic
|
|
|
|
The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
-Dame Edith Sitwell
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
I love Beethoven, especially the poems.
-Ringo Starr
|
|
|
|
Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.
-Captain J. G. Stedman
|
|
|
|
Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world.
-Wallace Stevens
Adagia
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
-Wallace Stevens
|
|
|
|
No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.
-Sir William Temple
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.
-Henry David Thoreau
|
|
|
|
Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.
-Henry David Thoreau
|
|
|
|
War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.
-Mark Twain
|
|
|
|
Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you --like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist --or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.
-Source Unknown
|
|
|
|
Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it, but to those who need it.
-Source Unknown
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
-Paul Ambroise Valery
|
|
|
|
It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
|
|
|
|
Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
|
|
|
|
This poem will never reach its destination. On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
|
|
|
|
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
-Walt Whitman
Emerson, 1892
|
|
|
|
A poet can survive anything but a misprint.
-Oscar Wilde
|
|
Books about Poetry
