POETRY QUOTATIONS
“A Poet’s Advice to Students”
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.
This may sound easy. It isn't
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel---but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling---not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself---in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else---means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time---and whenever we do it, we're not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning to blow up the world---unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn't.
It's the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.
- e e cummings
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~Leonard Cohen
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. ~Kahlil Gibran
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry. ~Mark Strand, "Eating Poetry," Reasons for Moving, 1968
There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either. ~Robert Graves, 1962 interview on BBC-TV, based on a very similar statement he overheard around 1955
Poetry is what gets lost in translation. ~Robert Frost
Imaginary gardens with real toads in them. ~Marianne Moore's definition of poetry, "Poetry," Collected Poems, 1951
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. ~Paul Valéry
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life. ~George Sand, 1851
Always be a poet, even in prose. ~Charles Baudelaire, "My Heart Laid Bare," Intimate Journals, 1864
Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. ~Eli Khamarov, The Shadow Zone
Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. ~Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. ~Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. ~Plato, Ion
Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. ~W.B. Yeats
The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse... the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. ~Aristotle, On Poetics
Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. ~Carl Sandburg
Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. ~John Keats
A poet can survive everything but a misprint. ~Oscar Wilde
To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie - True Poems flee. ~Emily Dickinson
The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem." ~Robert Penn Warren, "The Themes of Robert Frost," Hopwood Lecture, 1947
A poem begins with a lump in the throat. ~Robert Frost
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. ~Percy Byshe Shelley
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. ~Samuel McChord Crothers, "Every Man's Natural Desire to Be Somebody Else" The Dame School of Experience, 1920 Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is. ~James Branch Cabell
A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul." ~Soren Kierkegaard
"Therefore" is a word the poet must not know. ~André Gide
The poem is the point at which our strength gave out. ~Richard Rosen
It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things. ~Stephen Mallarme
The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed. ~W.B. Yeats
If the author had said "Let's us put on appropriate galoshes," there could, of course, have been no poem. ~Author Unknown
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. ~Novalis
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. ~John Cage
Only the poet has any right to be sorry for the poor, if he has anything to spare when he has thought of the dull, commonplace rich. ~William Bolitho
Who can tell the dancer from the dance? ~William Butler Yeats
Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. ~Christopher Fry
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone. ~Thomas Hardy
The poet doesn't invent. He listens. ~Jean Cocteau
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. ~Gustave Flaubert
Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket. ~Charles Simic
The only problem with Haiku is that you just get started and then ~Author Unknown
To have great poets there must be great audiences too. ~Walt Whitman
Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out.... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure. ~A.E. Housman
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. ~Thomas Babington Macaulay
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own. ~Salvatore Quasimodo
You can't write poetry on the computer. ~Quentin Tarantino
Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young. ~Sainte-Beuve, Portraits littéraires, 1862
Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker. ~Allen Tate
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. ~Joseph Joubert
God is the perfect poet. ~Robert Browning
Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know. ~Joseph Roux, Meditations of a Parish Priest
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. ~Carl Sandburg
The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood. ~Jean Cocteau, Le Rappel á l'ordre, 1926
Poetry is life distilled. ~Gwendolyn Brooks
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. ~Thomas Gray
He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise. ~Oscar Wilde
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. ~Robert Frost
You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. ~John Ciardi, Simmons Review, Fall 1962
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. ~William Hazlitt
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. ~Yevgeny Yentushenko, The Sole Survivor, 1982
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. ~E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. ~T.S. Eliot, Dante, 1920
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows. ~Edmund Burke
Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things. ~Robert Frost
Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything. ~William Blissett
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. ~Robert Frost
If you've got a poem within you today, I can guarantee you a tomorrow. ~Terri Guillemets
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. ~Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 1957
We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. Dead Poet's Society
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. ~T.S. Eliot, Tradition and Individual Talent, 1919
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content. ~Alfred de Musset, Le Poète déchu, 1839
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. ~Paul Engle, New York Times, 17 February 1957
I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me. ~Edith Södergran
I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down. ~Robert Frost, 1935
Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts. ~Robinson Jeffers
He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite. ~Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics. ~Edgar Allan Poe
The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see - it is, rather, a light by which we may see - and what we see is life. ~Robert Penn Warren, Saturday Review, 22 March 1958
A poem should not mean But be. ~Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica, 1926
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it. ~W.H. Auden
Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry. ~Muriel Rukeyser
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. ~Pablo Neruda, quoted in Wall Street Journal,, 14 November 1985
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, Poetic Manifesto, 1961
Poets aren't very useful Because they aren't consumeful or very produceful. ~Ogden Nash
What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed? ~W.H. Auden
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie. ~Jean Cocteau
Mathematics and Poetry are... the utterance of the same power of imagination, only that in the one case it is addressed to the head, in the other, to the heart. ~Thomas Hill
The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes. ~W. Somerset Maugham
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. ~Jean Cocteau
Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof. ~Rene Char
[A poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom. ~Robert Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes," Collected Poems of Robert Frost, 1939
Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did. ~Christopher Morley, John Mistletoe
The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past. ~Robert Frost
[P]oets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science. ~Sigmund Freud
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. ~Edgar Allan Poe
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. ~Robert Frost
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. ~Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. ~Samuel Johnson
I've written some poetry I don't understand myself. ~Carl Sandburg
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. ~Jean Cocteau
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. ~Don Marquis
No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers. ~Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Satires
The poetry of the earth is never dead. ~John Keats
A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer.... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. ~E.B. White
The poet... may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. ~Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 1950
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. ~Rita Dove
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. ~G.K. Chesterton
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. ~Salman Rushdie
Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them. ~Dennis Gabor
Many of the above quotations were originally found at: http://www.quotegarden.com/poetry.html
Poetry Definitions: Carl Sandburg
Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poetry
1. Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.
2. Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.
3. Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, ‘Listen!’ and ‘Did you see it?’ ‘Did you hear it? What was it?’
4. Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.
5. Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, crosslights, and moon wisps.
6. Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension.
7. Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.
8. Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.
9. Poetry is an echo asking a shadow dancer to be a partner.
10. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air.
11. Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.
12. Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.
13. Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.
14. Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration.
15. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.
16. Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.
17. Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.
18. Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.
19. Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.
20. Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.
21. Poetry is a silver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.
22. Poetry is a mock of a cry at finding a million dollars and a mock of a laugh at losing it.
23. Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.
24. Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.
25. Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.
26. Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night.
27. Poetry is statement of a series of equations, with numbers and symbols changing like the changes of mirrors, pools, skies, the only never-changing sign being the sign of infinity.
28. Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.
29. Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, ‘Oh!’ and another, ‘How?’
30. Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.
31. Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.
32. Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.
33. Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions.
34. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
35. Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters.
36. Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
37. Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.
38. Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.
From:
Sandburg, Carl. Selected Poems. Ed. by George Hendrick and Willene Hendrick.
Harcourt Brace and Company. New York . 1996
