Poetry Quotes - Page 39

• Poetry to me is prayer.

  Anne Sexton

  Prayer

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• It's a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it.

  Anne Sexton

  Believe, Writing, Self

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• Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.

  John Ruskin

  Saws, Speak, Milton

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• Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.

  Mary Oliver

  Adjectives, Verbs, Looks

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• The three ingredients of poetry: the mystery of the universe, spiritual curiosity, the energy of language.

  Mary Oliver

  Spiritual, Curiosity, Energy

  Mary Oliver (1995). “Blue Pastures”, Harcourt

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• My verses are my diary. My poetry is a poetry of proper names.

  Marina Tsvetaeva

  Names, Diaries, Verses

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• Poetry cannot be explained, it must be lived.

  Anne Hebert

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• Poetry colors beings, objects, landscapes and sensations with a kind of new and particular light, which is in fact that of the poet's emotions.

  Anne Hebert

  Light, Color, Landscape

  Anne Hébert, Alan Brown (1975). “Poems”, Don Mills, Ont. : Musson Book Company

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• the attempt to control poetry, to subordinate it to extra-poetic ends, constitutes misuse.

  Jan Clausen

  Poetic, Misuse, Ends

  Jan Clausen (1982). “A movement of poets: thoughts on poetry and feminism”, Long Haul Pr

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• we are far too used to the assumption that poetry and poets will be there when we want them, no matter how long they have been ignored, taken for granted, misused. After all, isn't poetry a form of prophecy, and aren't prophets known for their talent for flourishing in inhospitable deserts and other bleak surroundings? Maybe. But maybe not indefinitely.

  Jan Clausen

  Taken, Long, Desert

  Jan Clausen (1982). “A movement of poets: thoughts on poetry and feminism”, Long Haul Pr

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• Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day, or Warren's blackin' or Rowland's oil, or some o' them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.

  Charles Dickens

  Funny, Humorous, Boys

  1836-7 Sam Weller's father. Pickwick Papers, ch.33.

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• Poetry, unlike music, is a meta-art, and relies upon non-physical structures for the production of its effects. In its case, the medium is syntax, grammar and logical continuity, which together form the carrier-wave of plain sense within which its deeper meanings are broadcast.

  Don Paterson

  Art, Rely Upon, Together

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• Poetry lies at the centre of the literary experience because it is the form that most clearly asserts the specificity of literature.

  Jonathan Culler

  Art, Lying, Literature

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• Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.

  Immanuel Kant

  Art, Example, Genius

  Immanuel Kant (2015). “The Critique of Judgment: Theory of the Aesthetic Judgment and Theory of the Teleological Judgment: Critique of the Power of Judgment from the Author of Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals & Dreams of a Spirit-Seer”, p.170, e-artnow

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• Poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal verse) when it recognizes its connection - without apology - to its musical and ritualistic origins.

  Dana Gioia

  Art, Apology, Musical

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• I suggest that what artists do in all media can be summarized as deliberately performing the operations that occur instinctively during a ritualized behaviour: they simplify or formalize, repeat (sometimes with variation), exaggerate, and elaborate in both space and time for the purpose of attracting attention and provoking and manipulating emotional response.

  Ellen Dissanayake

  Art, Emotional, Media

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• All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Return, Ritual

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• Poetry gets to be the poetry of life by successfully becoming first the poetry of poetry.

  John Hollander

  Art, Firsts, Becoming

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• Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.

  George Oppen

  Art, Records, Want

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• Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.

  A. E. Housman

  Art, Thinking, Inability

  A. E. Housman (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of A. E. Housman (Illustrated)”, p.169, Delphi Classics

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• The public, as a whole, does not demand or appreciate the pure expression of beauty. Its cultured members expect to find in poetry, if anything, repose from material and nervous anxiety; an apt or chiselled phrase strokes the appetites and tickles the imagination. The more general public merely enjoys its platitudes and truisms jerked on to the understanding in line and rhyme; truth put into metre sounds overwhelmingly true.

  Harold Monro

  Art, Expression, Appreciate

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• Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Way, Hiding

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• It is a mistake to suppose, with some philosophers of aesthetics, that art and poetry aim to deal with the general and the abstract. This misconception has been foisted upon us by mediaeval logic. Art and poetry deal with the concrete of nature, not with separate 'particulars,' for such rows do not exist.

  Ernest Fenollosa

  Art, Mistake, Logic

  Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, Jonathan Stalling, Lucas Klein (2008). “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition”, p.54, Fordham University Press

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• The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical to the referent.

  Roman Jakobson

  Art, Function, Identical

  Roman Jakobson (1967). “To honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, 11 October 1966”

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• The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.

  Samuel Johnson

  Art, Writing, Ends

  Samuel Johnson (1977). “Selected Poetry and Prose”, p.304, Univ of California Press

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