Category: Great Quotes About Poetry

10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by John Keats

~ Paul Szlosek ~ Leave a comment

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“Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.”

“I should write for the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night’s labors should be burnt every morning and no eye shine upon them.”

“No sooner had I stepp’d into these pleasures Than I began to think of rhymes and measures: The air that floated by me seem’d to say ‘Write! thou wilt never have a better day.”

“All writing is a form of prayer.”

“I am convinced more and more day by day that fine writing is next to fine doing, the top thing in the world.”

“A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”

“The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man; it cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself.”

“Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”

“A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the Polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.”

“A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.”

– John Keats

10 Great Quotes About Poetry and Writing by Charles Simic

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 4 Comments

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“The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.”

“We name one thing and then another. That’s how time enters poetry. Space, on the other hand, comes into being through the attention we pay to each word. The more intense our attention, the more space, and there’s a lot of space inside words.”

“Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience. We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it. As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open.”

“One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.”

“Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator.”

“Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.”

A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.”

“The religion of the short poem, in every age and in every literature, has a single commandment: Less is always more. The short poem rejects preamble and summary. It’s about all and everything, the metaphysics of a few words surrounded by much silence. …The short poem is a match flaring up in a dark universe.”

“I’m not a stickler for truth. To me, lying in poetry is much more fun. I’m against lying in life, in principle, in any other activity except poetry.”

“I do believe that a poem needs to remind the reader of his or her own humanity, of what they are, of what they’re capable of. Awaken them, in a sense, to the fact that there’s a world in front of their eyes, that they have a body, they’re going to die, the sky is beautiful, it’s fun to be in a grassy field when the sun is shining—those kinds of things.”

– Charles Simic

 

 

Another 10 Great Quotes About Poetry and Writing by Billy Collins

~ Paul Szlosek ~ Leave a comment

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“The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.”

“Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There’s always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I’d say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it’s too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.”

“II think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can’t quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery.”

“I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.”

“There’s a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.”

“By clarity I don’t mean that we’re always in kind of a simple area where everything is clear and comforting and understood. Clarity is certainly a way toward disorientation because if you don’t start out – if the reader isn’t grounded, if the reader is disoriented in the beginning of the poem, then the reader can’t be led astray or disoriented later.”

“I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You’re out in the open field. You’re actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it’s easy to criticize something you can understand.”

“Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult poets that I really enjoy reading.”

“I’m trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I’m trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it’s usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination.”

“When I’m constructing a poem, I’m trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines – some hold up better as lines than others. But I’m not thinking of just writing a paragraph and then chopping it up.”

-Billy Collins

10 More Great Quotes About Poetry and Writing by Billy Collins

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 2 Comments

 

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“Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.”

“The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.”

“While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.”

“Write the poem only you can write.”

“You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.”

“The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, ‘What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?’ That’s the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.”

“I’m speaking to someone I’m trying to get to fall in love with me. I’m trying to speak intimately to one person. That should be clear. I’m not speaking to an audience. I’m not writing for the podium. I’m just writing, trying to write in a fairly quiet tone to one other reader who is by herself, or himself, and I’m trying to interrupt some silence in their life, which is utterance.”

“I find it strange that – at least in my take on it – the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be humorless, in their taste for poetry anyway. Humor is just an ingredient. It’s always been in poetry. It kind of dropped out of poetry I think during the 19th and up to the mid-twentieth century. But it’s found its way back. And it’s simply an ingredient.”

“Poems are not easy to start, and they’re not easy to finish. There’s a great pleasure in – I wouldn’t say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started.”

“The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry.”

-Billy Collins

10 Great Quotes About Poetry and Writing by Billy Collins

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 6 Comments

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“I’m very conscious of the fact that every line should have a cadence to it. It should contribute to the progress of the poem. And that the ending of the line is a way of turning the reader’s attention back into the interior of the poem.”

“I always think W.S. Merwin’s poems will last of anyone writing today. If I had to bet on posterity I would bet Merwin. My poems could easily evaporate. So I don’t know. If you find yourself as a writer thinking about posterity you should probably go out for a brisk walk or something.”

“As soon as I start to write I’m very aware, I’m trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I’m writing – and I think that this is important for all writers – I’m trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth. I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I’ll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.”

“I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one’s interested in the experiences of a stranger – let’s put it that way. And then you have difficulty combined with presumptuousness, which is the most dire trouble with poetry.”

“More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane degree – a difficulty which really ignores the possibility of having a sensible reader.”

“I can’t picture myself starting out aiming to do anything or having much of an agenda. I think in writing a poem, I’m making some tonal adjustments, and it took me a long time to allow anything like fun into my poetry.”

“Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.”

“When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don’t have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.”

“High School is the place where poetry goes to die.”

“I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.”

-Billy Collins

10 Great Quotes About Poetry and Writing by Rita Dove

~ Paul Szlosek ~ Leave a comment

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“If the poem is so moving that even if you have no experience in that particular setting be it 1920’s Harlem let’s say. You still are so moved that you can put yourself in that position. That means that the writer has managed to go beyond the personal and touch the humanity in all of us and it’s really a blast to read it because I realize how that this does hold true for the truly great poems.”

“I think that when a poem can move readers across generations and across its specific class or race then it becomes truly classic.”

“At the very beginning when I begin writing a poem I try not to think of the audience or anyone at all except for trying to get at the very center of what is driving that poem. In a way it’s like analyzing myself.”

“My first advice would be to read, read, read, which sounds interesting coming in a digital age, but it’s so much easier to listen to a poem than it is to sit down and actually read it and to hear it in your head and that is something that every poet or aspiring poet needs to be able to do, I think to hear it in their head.”

“Poetry of all the forms of literature I think is the most suited for the digital age and for the shorter attention spans and all of that. It Twitters very easily, some lyric poems and it’s very easy to zip a poem to someone, so that’s one of the things I think is wonderful about poetry in the digital age.”

“I’ve always felt that the poems I’ve written which have historical context are hopefully not just simply plucking something out of history and saying great, let’s write about that. In every case what has happened is that I’ve become fascinated or haunted by something and couldn’t shake it.”

“I think that you certainly don’t have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem.”

“My best times are midnight to six actually. I’ll leaf through my notebooks and if something catches my eye and I feel like I want to transfer it from the notebook to the page, I do, and then comes this very strange process which is difficult to describe in that I’ll write until I get stuck or I can’t go any further or I’m boring myself or whatever and then I might go to another poem.”

“My inspiration comes from everywhere, just walking down the street and I never know where it’s going to come from, so I keep a notebook with me at all times and the only criteria for anything making it into that notebook is if it stops me in my tracks for even an instant, if it catches my eye or my ear and I just write it down.”

“If I begin writing a poem that means I’m intrigued in some way by whatever it’s about and that if I’m not trying to find something new and pushing the envelope in the poem I can’t expect my reader to be particularly excited about it either.”

-Rita Dove

10 Great Quotes About Poets and Poetry by T. S. Eliot

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 5 Comments

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“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.”

“The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”

“The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.”

“Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.”

“What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.”

“Poetry is a mug’s game.”

“When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.”

– T.S. Eliot

10 Great Quotes About Poets and Poetry by Robert Frost

~ Paul Szlosek

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“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”

“A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”

“A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.”

“I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.”

“Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.”

“Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.”

“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”

“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”

“Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.”

“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.”

– Robert Frost

10 Great Quotes About Poets and Poetry by Archibald MacLeish

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 9 Comments

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“A poem should not mean, but be.”

“Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.”

“If you commit yourself to the art of poetry, you commit yourself to the task of learning how to see, using words as elements of sight and their sounds as prisms. And to see means to see something worth all the agony of learning how to see.”

“A poem should be palpable and mute as a globed fruit.”

“Poets are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.”

“If the poem can be improved by the author’s explanations, it never should have been published.”

“Poetry which owes no man anything, owes nevertheless one debt – an image of the world in which men can again believe.”

“If the art of poetry is the art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it’s not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos.”

“Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.”

“Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.”

– Archibald MacLeish

10 More Great Quotes About Poetry by Carl Sandburg

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 2 Comments

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“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.”

“Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions.”

“Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration.”

“Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.”

“Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.”

“Poetry is a sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.”

“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.”

“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?'”

“Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language”

“Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.”

 – Carl Sandburg