Celebrate National Poetry Month |
- "A poet is someone who is astonished by everything."
-- Anonymous - "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 - "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 - "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 - "Always be a poet, even in prose. "
--Charles Baudelaire - "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 - "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 - "Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry."
-- Georges Brague - "Eloquence is the poetry of prose."
-- William C. Bryant - "There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. "
--John Cage - "The poet doesn't invent. He listens. "
--Jean Cocteau - " Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."
--Leonard Cohen - "Prose [is] words in their best order; Poetry [is] the best words in the best order."
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge - " You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose."
-- Mario Cuomo - " My poetry, I should think, has become the way of my giving out what music is within me."
-- Countee Cullen - " Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate."
-- John Denham - " 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 we have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things."
-- Emily Dickinson - "To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie - True Poems flee."
--Emily Dickinson - " 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 - " Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly."
-- T. S. Eliot - " Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."
-- T. S. Eliot - " I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling."
-- T. S. Eliot
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- " The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson - " There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it."
-- Gustave Flaubert - "Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry."
--Gustave Flaubert - "A poem begins with a lump in the throat. "
--Robert Frost - " Poetry is what gets lost in translation."
-- Robert Frost - " Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement."
-- Christopher Fry - "Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. "
--Kahlil Gibran - ""Therefore" is a word the poet must not know. "
--André Gide - " There's no money in poetry, but there's no poetry in money, either."
-- Robert Ranke Graves - "If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone."
--Thomas Hardy - "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 - " Science sees signs; Poetry the thing signified."
-- Augustus and Julius Hare - " Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means."
-- Heinrich Heine - " Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul."
-- Henrik Ibsen - " Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance."
-- John Keats - " When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existance. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses."
-- John F. Kennedy - "Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. "
--Eli Khamarov
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- " Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo."
-- Don Marquis - " Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have."
-- John Masefield - "Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind."
--Thomas Babington Macaulay - "It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things."
--Stephen Mallarme - "Imaginary gardens with real toads in them. "
--Marianne Moore's definition of poetry, "Poetry," Collected Poems, 1951 - " Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people."
-- Adrian Mitchell - " We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry."
-- Maria Mitchell - " Marriage: a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose."
-- Beverly Nichols - "Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. "
--Novalis - " Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history."
-- Plato - "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 - " Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance."
-- M. C. Richards - " The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly."
-- Frederick William Robertson - "The poem is the point at which our strength gave out. "
--Richard Rosen - " Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know."
-- Joseph Roux - " 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 - "Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. "
--Carl Sandburg - "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 - " 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 - " 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 - " Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley - "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. "
--Percy Byshe Shelley
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- "Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket. "
--Charles Simic - "Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry."
--Mark Strand - " Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech."
-- Simonides - " 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 - " 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 - " Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech."
-- Henry David Thoreau - "You can't write poetry on the computer. "
--Quentin Tarantino - "The only problem with Haiku is that you just get started and then"
--Unknown - "If the author had said "Let's us put on appropriate galoshes," there could, of course, have been no poem. "
-- Unknown - "A poem is never finished, only abandoned. "
--Paul Valéry - " Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls."
-- Voltaire - "To have great poets there must be great audiences too. "
--Walt Whitman - "A poet can survive everything but a misprint. "
--Oscar Wilde - " All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."
-- Oscar Wilde - " But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents."
-- William Carlos Williams - " Out of our quarrels with others we make rhetoric. Out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry."
-- W.B. Yeats - "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 - "Sensations Sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart."
-- William Wordsworth - "Wisdom married to immortal verse."
-- William Wordsworth - "Choice word and measured phrase above the reach Of ordinary men."
-- William Wordsworth - "Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge."
-- William Wordsworth
Poetry On Record:
98 Poets Read Their Work (1888-2006) by Various Artists
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