Poetry Quotes - Page 17

• All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

  Oscar Wilde

  Spring, Book, Reading

  Oscar Wilde (2005). “The Prose of Oscar Wilde”, p.186, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

  Mary Karr

  Inspirational, Sympathy, Book

  "Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly" with Judy Valente, www.pbs.org. March 4, 2011.

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• I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

  T. S. Eliot

  Loneliness, Thinking, Mermaid

  "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" l. 122 (1917)

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• He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

  W. H. Auden

  Love, Death, Song

  "Funeral Blues" l. 9 (1936)

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• Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.

  Voltaire

  Moving, Men, Teach

  Francois Voltaire (1977). “The Portable Voltaire”, p.313, Penguin

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• To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie— True Poems flee—

  Emily Dickinson

  Summer, Nature, Lying

  Emily Dickinson, Ralph William Franklin (1998). “The Poems of Emily Dickinson”, p.1309, Harvard University Press

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• I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn't come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ahhh." That was the first poem.

  Lucille Clifton

  Thinking, Sky, Caves

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• Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

  Carl Sandburg

  Writing, Invisible, Keepsakes

  Carl Sandburg (2015). “Harvest Poems: 1910-1960”, p.77, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• You can't write poetry on the computer.

  Quentin Tarantino

  Inspirational, Writing, Computer

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• 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

  Children, Writing, Throwing Stones

  The Independent on Sunday, June 24, 1990.

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• Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

  Stephen Spender

  Great Poet, Can Do, Written

  The New York Times, March 26, 1961.

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• The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

  Lionel Trilling

  Art, Philosophy, Weather

  1950 The Liberal Imagination.

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• I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself.

  Carl Sandburg

  Art, Written

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• The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a faculty the less? or a sense the more?

  Augustus William Hare

  Looks, Poet, Faculty

  Julius Charles HARE (Archdeacon of Lewes. and HARE (Augustus William)), Augustus William HARE (1847). “Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers. Third edition. First Series”, p.278

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• The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Long, Pages, Stamps

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• The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

  Matthew Arnold

  Simplicity, Noble, Serious Subjects

  On Translating Homer: Last Words (1862)

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• There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Men, World, Biographies

  Critical and Miscellaneous Essays "Sir Walter Scott" (1838)

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• Poetry is the only life got, the only work done, the only pure product and free labor of man, performed only when he has put all the world under his feet, and conquered the last of his foes.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Feet, Done

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.279, Simon and Schuster

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• The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

  T. S. Eliot

  Writing, Feelings, Mind

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Selected Essays”, p.17, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there's a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry.poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America.

  Rita Dove

  Moving, America, Perception

  Quoted in N.Y. Times, 20 June 1993

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• 

  Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.

  Andrea Gibson

  Inspirational, Broken Heart, Prayer

  Andrea Gibson (2018). “Take Me With You”, p.64, Penguin

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• Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

  David Hare

  Nature, Keys, Hieroglyphics

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• One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

  Paul Muldoon

  Tree, Way, Frost

  Interview with John Redmond, www.poetrymagazines.org.uk. November 2, 1995.

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• The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.

  Jose Bergamin

  Despair, Born, Novel

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• It seems to me a purely lyric poet gives himself, right down to his sex, to his mood, utterly and abandonedly, whirls himself roundtill he spontaneously combusts into verse. He has nothing that goes on, no passion, only a few intense moods, separate like odd stars, and when each has burned away, he must die.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Sex, Stars, Passion

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