Poetry Is Quotes - Page 22

• The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay ... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.

  Matthew Arnold

  Art, Destiny, Race

  Matthew Arnold (1961). “Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold”, Houghton Mifflin College Division

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• The language of poetry is not stuck in place. Nothing can own language. I think, however, the genre of poetry itself is very feminine and motherly.

  Kim Hyesoon

  Thinking, Language, Motherly

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Zen is poetry; poetry is Zen.

  Reginald Horace Blyth

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• Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

  Mary Oliver

  Art, Wilderness, Fine

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.106, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Music is good, not evil. Poetry is good, not evil. Primitive, but oh, so true!

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Evil, Music Is, Primitive

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• Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from
  the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from
  what your teacher taught you to do in school.

  Margaret Atwood

  Teacher, School, Ideas

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• To me Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.

  Charles Bukowski

  Art, Writing, Men

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• It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.

  Philip Larkin

  Writing, Trying, Good Poetry

  Philip Larkin (2012). “Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982”, p.72, Faber & Faber

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• For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.

  Derek Walcott

  Morning, Falling In Love, Fate

  Derek Walcott (2014). “What the Twilight Says: Essays”, p.79, Macmillan

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• Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.

  George Santayana

  Echoes, Vision, Arms

  George Santayana (1970). “Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe”, p.131, Library of Alexandria

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• Engineering, like poetry, is an attempt to approach perfection. And engineers, like poets, are seldom completely satisfied with their creations. They notice, even if no one else does, the world that is not quite le mot juste, or the hairline crack that blemishes the structure.

  Henry Petroski

  Engineering, Perfection, Doe

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• We have demythologized prematurely, that we've actually lost the vocabulary for discussing reality at its largest scales. The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Reality, Vocabulary, Opposites

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Thinking, Want, Actresses

  "Love Among the Artists". Book by George Bernard Shaw, 1900.

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• Poetry is a religion without hope, but its martyrs guarantee the eternal truth of its dogma.

  Jean Cocteau

  Guarantees, Dogma, Martyr

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• Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Geometry, Subjects, Precise

  Letter to Louise Colet, 14 August 1853

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• Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Art, Understanding, Alive

  Recalled on his death, 20 Apr1982.

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• If the art of poetry is?the art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it's not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Art, Chaos, Human Experience

  On his work in government. Quoted in Scott Donaldson Archibald MacLeish (1992).

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• Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familiar, eternalizing the poet's own perception in unique and original verbal form.

  Philip Larkin

  Unique, Sanity, Affair

  "Required Writing-Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982". Book by Philip Larkin, Farrar Strauss, 1984.

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• In its use of words poetry is just the reverse of science. Very definite thoughts do occur, but not because the words are so chosen as logically to bar out all possibilities save one.

  David Daiches

  Poetry, Bars, Use

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• Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Independent, Sometimes, Reason

  Christian Nestell Bovee (1862). “Intuitions and Summaries of Thought”, p.206

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• Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it--indeed the world's need of it--these never pass.

  Mary Oliver

  Moving, Fall, Voice

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.9, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

  Mary Oliver

  Ideas, Poetry, Feelings

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.108, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering--I mean remembering in words--what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives.

  Mary Oliver

  Art, Mean, Poetry

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.106, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.

  Randall Jarrell

  Animal, Form, Human Life

  "Poetry and the Age" by Randall Jarrell, Vintage paperback, (p. 22), 1955.

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• Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano.

  Randall Jarrell

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Air

  "Poetry and the Age" by Randall Jarrell, Vintage paperback, (p. 127), 1955.

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