Category: Great Quotes About Poetry
10 Great Quotes About Poetry, Writing, and Art by Jane Hirshfield
“Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known. If you look with open eyes at your actual life, it’s always going to be the kind of long division problem that doesn’t work out perfectly evenly. Poems let you accept the multiplicity and complexity of the actual, they let us navigate the unnavigable, insoluble parts of our individual fates and shared existence.”
“Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life.”
“When I write, I don’t know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.”
“I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.”
“Creativity itself is a joyous unlatching. The act of creative imagining, inventing, saying differently, crafting a metaphor or image, then crafting another metaphor or image when you go further or when you revise – all these take whatever you think “is” and make clear that other possibilities exist as well. The sense of possibility, the amplitude and freedom that sense of malleability brings – for me, that cannot help but be joyous.”
“The secret of understanding poetry is to hear poetry’s words as what they are: the full self’s most intimate speech, half waking, half dream. You listen to a poem as you might listen to someone you love who tells you their truest day. Their words might weep, joke, whirl, leap. What’s unspoken in the words will still be heard. It’s also the way we listen to music: You don’t look for extractable meaning, but to be moved.”
“Poetry itself, when allowed to, becomes within us a playable organ of perception, sounding out its own forms of knowledge and forms of discovery. Poems do not simply express. They make, they find, they sound (in both meanings of that word) things undiscoverable by other means.”
“The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtaposition as making a spark requires two things struck together.”
“Art keeps its newness because it’s at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It’s more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art’s discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths.”
“A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry’s language carries what lives outside language. It’s as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.”
—Jane Hirshfield
10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Howard Nemerov
“Robert Frost had always said you mustn’t think of the last line first, or it’s only a fake poem, not a real one. I’m inclined to agree.”
“I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.”
“Writing is like the relationship with your bowels. First you can, then you can’t. Finally, you must. Only then should you reach for the paper.”
“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”
“I’ve never read a political poem that’s accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.”
“It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.”
“Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.”
“A lot happens by accident in poetry.”
“I think there’s one thing which distinguishes our art – we don’t consider. We don’t think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.”
“I’ve thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn’t work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.”
—Howard Nemerov
10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Art by Randall Jarrell
“A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.”
“Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion.”
“Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.”
“Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.”
“Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano.”
“The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.”
“A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.”
“It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.”
“I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can’t read any poetry.”
“There is in this world no line [of poetry] so bad that someone won’t someday copy it.”
—Randall Jarrell
10 Great Quotes About Poetry, Writing, and Art by Robert Pinsky
“Poetry’s medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.”
“A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it—in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry.”
“An underestimated element in poetry, that reading aloud makes clear, is the pause. I mean especially the force of a pause or a couple of pauses close together, contrasted with a longer unit of grammar.”
“Poetry is not easy. Or should I say, real poetry is not easy.”
“I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words – fitting them together or disrupting their customary march – more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.”
“‘Write’ is almost the wrong verb for what I do. I think ‘compose’ is more accurate because you’re trying to make the sounds in your mind and in your voice. So I compose while I’m driving or in the shower.
“If a poem is written well, it was written with the poet’s voice and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.”
“If what you want to do is make good art, decide what’s good and try to imitate it.”
“The last thing a young artist should do in poetry or any other field is think about what’s in style, what’s current, what are the trends. Think instead of what you like to read, what do you admire, what you like to listen to in music. What do you like to look at in architecture? Try to make a poem that has some of those qualities.”
“Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while respecting that structure.”
—Robert Pinsky
10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Ezra Pound
“Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.”
“The primary pigment of poetry is the Image.”
“The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.”
“Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim land of peace.’ It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction.”
“And the good writer chooses his words for their ‘meaning’, but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.”
“Rhythm is form cut into time.”
“One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.”
“Poetry is a very complex art…. It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.”
“Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.”
“Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.”
—Ezra Pound
10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Edward Hirsch
“Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.”
“And my experience is the best titles, for me, emerge in the process of writing. They don’t usually come at the very beginning and hopefully they don’t come at the very end because then it’s getting late in the day.”
“A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.”
“The poet wants justice. And the poet wants art. In poetry, we can’t have one without the other.”
“One of the deep fundamentals of poetry is the recurrence of sounds, syllables, words, phrases, lines, and stanzas. Repetition can be one of the most intoxicating features of poetry. It creates expectations, which can be fulfilled or frustrated. It can create a sense of boredom and complacency, but it can also incite enchantment and inspire bliss.”
“The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.”
“I think there are different kinds of poetry for different stages of life and there’s the wild, exuberance of youth, there’s the painful agony of midlife experience, there’s the late poetry in the presence of death.”
“Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We’re involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We’re always going to need it.”
“There has never been a great poet who wasn’t also a great reader of poetry.”
“Emily Dickinson calls previous poets her kinsmen of the shelf. You can always be consoled by your kinsmen of the shelf and you can participate in poetry by going to them and by trying to make something worthy of them.”
—Edward Hirsch
10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Paul Engle
“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.”
“Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.”
“All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.
“But maybe it’s up the hills or under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it’s never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.”
“I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.”
“Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet’s abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.”
“Writing is like this — you dredge for the poem’s meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.”
“The years rolled their brutal course down the hill of time. Still poor, my clothes still smelling of the horse barn, still writing those doubtful poems where too much emotion clashed with too many words”.
“Has the painter not always gone to an art school, or at least to an established master, for instruction? And the composer, the sculptor, the architect? Then why not the writer? Good poets, like good hybrid corn, are both born and made.”
—Paul Engle
10 Great Quotes About Poets and Poetry by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Only poetry inspires poetry.”
“Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.”
“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.”
“Every word was once a poem.”
“It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.”
“Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.”
“Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.”
“For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.”
“For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem.”
“The true poem is the poet’s mind.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Art by Jean Cocteau
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