quotations about poetry
The worst slam poetry is just banal prose with peculiar line breaks, syllable counting gurning and mime hands. Noble social protest is lost beneath all the posturing self-aggrandisement, faux patois and, ironically "keeping it real". The best Slam poets -- the really good ones who get toured around and awarded residencies even though they rarely, if ever, compete anymore and less often publish -- are genuinely brilliant, cut from the same cloth as the best stand-up comedians and character actors, but are still largely performing dramatic monologues.
ANDREW PAUL WOOD
"Slam poetry is despicable and dumb-ass and not good", The Spinoff, April 27, 2016
Babies are not brought by storks, and poets are not produced by workshops.
JAMES FENTON
Ronald Duncan Lecture, 1992
Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Divine Comedy"
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Rain Taxi, winter 2000/2001
Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.
AMY LOWELL
preface, Tendencies in Modern Poetry
Poets are the most injurious romancers by which society is deluded; for they excite the feelings or the imagination to such an extent--creating superhuman excellences--that the dull realities of life, its frauds, its meanness, its falsehood, or even its truth, alike sicken and disgust.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.
J.M. COETZEE
Disgrace
Poetry is indispensable -- if I only knew what for.
JEAN COCTEAU
attributed, The Necessity of Art
No really sensible person ever remembers enough poetry to recite it.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
Sometimes when a prose poem is floundering, I rewrite it as verse, and it's better in that form. The reverse process of verse into prose poem, also works to clarify what's working in the writing and what's not. It's not a blunt line that demarcates the difference between verse and the prose poem.
WALTER BARGEN
"An interview with Walter Bargen, first poet laureate of Missouri"
Once I started writing all the time and interacting with poets, I made a conscious decision to identify myself as a poet. It's funny how much a single word can provide focus and direction. As soon as I claimed that identity, I started clearing more and more space for poetry in my life and applying poetic tools to other areas of my life. The world became a different place, and I witnessed it through different kinds of eyes.
TRACY K. SMITH
interview, Gulf Coast, vol. 17, number 1
Poetry is the music of the soul, and above all, of great and feeling souls.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.
T. S. ELIOT
The Music of Poetry
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck,
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck.
JOHN DRYDEN
Abaslom and Achitophel
One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read -- in such a moment, anything can happen.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs -- no regular hours, so many temptations!
ELIZABETH BISHOP
One Art: Letters
We do not reject the song that makes the blood dance faster through our veins, or the lyric that thrills us with its sensuous beauty, or the romantic tale that fills up some painful or languorous hour, or the ode that sometimes, lapping our spirits in forgetfulness or summer dreams, brings us welcome reprieve from life's "sore spell of toil." But our unstinted and undying gratitude we reserve for the poet who, finding us disconsolate, comforts us; who, finding us disheartened and ready to yield, sounds the note of advance for us; who, finding us recreant to our trust and disloyal to our aspirations, uncovers for us once more the ideal that has been temporarily obscured. It is he who stays our feet amid the whirling waters of temptation; who sets the stars of faith and love and hope in our benighted sky, and who whispers to us in our lonely and nerveless moments of despair the heartening message of God and immortality.
FRANK CUMMINS LOCKWOOD
Robert Browning
I'm a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
The Paris Review, fall 1981