Poetry Quotes - Page 4

• I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.

  Jim Jarmusch

  Thinking, Visionaries, Way

  The Guardian Interview, www.theguardian.com. November 15, 199.

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• Poetry is when you talk to yourself.

  William Hughes Mearns

  Poetry Is

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• A poet wants only one small stone on which to carve his life.

  Joan Walsh Anglund

  Want, Stones, Poet

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• If Painting be Poetry's sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dragoons with drawn sabres and white-plumed helmets.

  Augustus William Hare

  Sheep, White, Body

  Augustus William Hare (1827). “Guesses at Truth”, p.243

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• All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

  John Fowles

  Past, Thousand

  John Fowles, Barry Brukoff (1980). “The Enigma of Stonehenge”, Simon & Schuster

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• Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry... to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.

  John Berger

  Together, Torn Apart, Violence

  John Berger (2008). “Selected Essays of John Berger”, p.705, Vintage

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• Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones.

  Samuel Johnson

  Cutting, Rocks, Genius

  To Hannah More, who had expressed a wonder that the poet who had written 'Paradise Lost' should write such poor Sonnets, in James Boswell 'The Life of Samuel Johnson' (1791) vol. 4, p. 305 (13 June 1784)

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• Poetry must be as well written as prose.

  Ezra Pound

  Wells, Prose, Written

  Letter to Harriet Monroe, Jan. 1915

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• Poetry is prose, bent out of shape.

  J. Patrick Lewis

  Shapes, Bent, Prose

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• A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland.

  Khalil Gibran

  Wings, Bird, Excellence

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• I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

  William Wordsworth

  Powerful, Feelings, Mind

  William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth (1815). “Poems”, p.388

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• Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.

  Jeremy Bentham

  Fall, Goes On, Lines

  In M. St. J. Packe 'The Life of John Stuart Mill' (1954) bk. 1, ch. 2

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• Well, write poetry, for God's sake, it's the only thing that matters.

  e. e. cummings

  Writing, Sake, Matter

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• Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed, and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie, you... gather together whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands around the live coal of life.

  Pablo Neruda

  Writing, Men, Hands

  Milton Rogovin, Pablo Neruda, Dennis Maloney, Robert Bly (1984). “Windows that open inward: images of Chile”, White Pine Pr

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• Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.

  Walter Pater

  Writing, Difficult, Prose

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• You I am sure will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and 'load every rift' of your subject with ore.

  Bob Dylan

  Artist, Forgive Me, Forgiving

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• A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end.
  Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

  Robert Graves

  Perfect, Immature, World

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• I have to submit to much in order to pacify the touchy tribe of poets.

  Horace

  Order, Tribes, Submit

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• It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

  Lord Byron

  Earthquakes, Imagination, Eruption

  Letter to Annabella Milbanke, 29 November 1813, in L. A. Marchand (ed.) 'Byron's Letters and Journals' vol. 3 (1974)

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• The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky sentence, I try to write up to the poetry that I have recited beforehand.

  Janet Fitch

  Writing, Trying, Language

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• Modern poets add a lot of water to their ink.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Water, Ink, Add

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, W. B. Rönnfeldt (1898*). “Goethe's Criticisms, Reflections, and Maxims”

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• Poetry is a means of redemption.

  Wallace Stevens

  Mean, Redemption, Poetry Is

  1957 Opus Posthumous, Aphorisms,'Adagia'.

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• Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Writing, Today, Remember

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• For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Argument

  1844 Essays: Second Series,'The Poet'.

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• Poetry is an act of peace.

  Pablo Neruda

  Poetry Is

  Pablo Neruda (1977). “Memoirs”

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