quotations about poetry
Out on the foolish phrase, but there's a hard rhyming without it.
ROBERT BROWNING
letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 26, 1845
Poetry is indispensable -- if I only knew what for.
JEAN COCTEAU
attributed, The Necessity of Art
The object of linguistics is language; that of poetics is concrete utterance. Language is an institution, a formal system which constitutes, for the hypothetical speaker, a "competence"; it is a virtual object. Speech (the poetic utterance, for our purposes) is an individual act which formulates a concrete discourse; it is a "performance".
ANNA BALAKIAN
The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages
The poet is the man that sings,
That plays upon the harp's wild strings,
That reads the tale of starry skies,
That soars aloft on seraph's wings.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN FIELD
"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
We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us -- and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle or amaze with itself, but with its subject.
JOHN KEATS
letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, February 3, 1818
A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests.
JOHN DRYDEN
Fables, Ancient and Modern
If the poet would avoid pepsis in his patients, his scalpel must be as clean as the surgeon's.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
J. D. SALINGER
"Teddy"
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
Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
"The Theatre of Cruelty" (Second Manifesto), The Theater and Its Double
All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Philosophy of Composition"
If Poetry comes not as naturally as Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
JOHN KEATS
letter to John Taylor, February 27, 1818
No one ever expects poetry to sell.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
Poetry has the power to turn words into darts that shoot under your skin.
PENNY ASHTON
"Poetry Idol's organiser is shocked and saddened to learn that slam poetry is 'dumb-ass and not good'", The Spinoff, April 28, 2016
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck,
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck.
JOHN DRYDEN
Abaslom and Achitophel
The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds
Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;
But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,
He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"The Albotross"