Quotations on poetry

[spiros]

Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.
John Masefield (1878-1967)

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

Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know.
Joseph Roux (circa 1886)

Science sees signs; Poetry the thing signified.
Augustus (and Julius) Hare (1792-1834)

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.
Georges Braque (1882-1963)

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.
John Denham (1615-1668)

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792- 1822)

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)

Poetry is like fish: if it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's bad; and if you're not certain, try it on the cat.
Osbert Sitwell (1892-1969)

The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.
Erik Satie (1866-1925)

Eloquence is the poetry of prose.
William C. Bryant (1794- 1878)

What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.
Arnold Palmer (1929-)

Out of our quarrels with others we make rhetoric. Out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry.
William Butler Yeats (1865- 1939)

Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.
Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)

My poetry, I should think, has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.
Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
Maria Mitchell (1818-1889)

Prose [is] words in their best order; Poetry [is] the best words in the best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Poetry is subconscious conversation, it is as much the work of those who understand it and those who make it
Sonia Sanchez (1934)

The joy of poetry is that it will wait for you. Novels don't wait for you. Characters change. But poetry will wait. I think it's the greatest art.
Sonia Sanchez (1934)

I've decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
Socrates (470?-399? BC)

He who draws noble delights from the sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
George Sand (1804-1876)

Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy may well be imminent in poetry - and we have Shakespeare.
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.
Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.
Peter Abrahams

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)


I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks. . . and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. . . . Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences . . .
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
Adrian Mitchell

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
Paul Dirac (1902-1984)

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
T. S. Eliot

Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls.
Voltaire

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.
Georges Brague

A poet is someone who is astonished by everything.
Anon

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis

I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.
Russell Baker

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Robert Frost

It's 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

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you - like music to the musician... or else it is nothing, an empty, formalised bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

[wings]

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Robert Frost

Να και μια πιθανή απάντηση σε ερώτηση που αποτέλεσε και αντικείμενο συζήτησής μας στο παρελθόν, ε;

[billberg23]

Then, too, there are those poor, benighted, misguided, misbegotten few who take a contrary view, who should be mentioned only for the sake of fairness to all sides:

The advantage poets have over us prose hacks is weight.  We try to let our words fall on the page like autumn leaves, gently and quietly.  Poets roll their words at you like bowling balls at an audience of wooden pins, hoping for a strike.... We like to stretch a thought out like a rubber band, stretch it as far as it will go.  Poets want to wad the rubber band up into a tangle, a little ball, and then expect us to chew on it.  We make room for humor, leave the doors wide open, believe in the moment.  Poets prefer the knitted brow, believe in eternity.  They want to make a difference, take themselves seriously.  Poets must be earnest, sober, edged in black like an announcement of death....
Peter Clough

"I too dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore famously of poetry, echoing, at least for once, the sentiment of millions.
Katha Pollitt

[spiros]

"I too dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore famously of poetry, echoing, at least for once, the sentiment of millions.
Katha Pollitt

I agree too; with Horace: pulchrum est paucorum hominum.

And, being truthful to the postmodern aspect of our times, with Nietzsche too who, in his turn, agreed with Horace (quoting him):

Alle grossen, alle schönen Dinge können nie Gemeingut sein: pulchrum est paucorum hominum.

Both variations on the eternal theme of casting pearls before swine.

[billberg23]

Yes, it’s true, there’s a profanum vulgus out there that just doesn’t understand, or want to understand, poetry — though they’re probably a tiny minority in some countries, like Turkey, where it seems as if every red-blooded male needs to produce at least one “slender tome” of verse. 

On the other hand, poetry may have acquired a bad reputation in some circles for being a refuge of fools — people who can’t learn to articulate their ideas with precision or even with good grammar, so must take pleasure in promulgating their imprecise “feelings” through poorly punctuated, sloppily written, truncated lines that have in common a horror of the right margin.  Confronted by so much of what passes for poetry these days, one feels that, given a bit of education, those soi-disant  “poets” might be able not only to express their ideas more effectively in prose, but also to clarify their own thoughts to themselves, so that they no longer need to grope for inane incantations.

But that ain’t gonna happen.  The stuff will keep pouring out onto the sterile ground that nourishes no intellectual standards.  And that’s nothing new.  As that pre-Islamic Arabic poet of the Mu’ allaqāt complains, “The poets have muddied all the little fountains.”

And I suppose real poets feel the problem more keenly than most of us.  Marianne Moore, who was one of the great poets of the twentieth century, began her most famous poem (entitled “Poetry”) with the words I quoted in my earlier post, “I too dislike it.”  She went on to make a plea that poets be “genuine,” that they “present for inspection ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’.”
(See the entire poem at http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/txt/1169.txt)