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Quotations about
Poetry, Poems, & Poets
Poetry vs Prose
Poetry is prose, bent out of shape. ~J. Patrick Lewis, "Poetry Is…", 2010
The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes... ~W. Somerset Maugham
The reason why this book is verse
(and nothing, I admit, is worse)
is that, as every schoolboy knows,
it takes much longer to write prose.
~Humbert Wolfe, "Preface," Cursory Rhymes, 1928
Always be a poet, even in prose. ~Charles Baudelaire
...poetry often brings consolation to the heart which prose has failed to touch... ~Luigi, Sweet Songs for Mourning Mothers, 1884 [Luigi is pseudonym for a still-unknown female compiler.
But if, as I hope, the reader has no objection to an occasional interlude of verse in all this prose, I will copy for him here the poem I wrote next morning — it being always easier to tell the strict truth in poetry rather than in prose... ~Richard Le Gallienne, "At Evening I Came to the Wood," October Vagabonds, 1910
A prose-writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. ~Samuel McChord Crothers
If it doesn't work horizontally as prose...
it probably
won't work
any better
vertically
pretending
to be poetry.
~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought!... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash. ~Mark Twain
[W]here is the actual boundary between poetry and prose? and how can one help owning that prose is but poetry gradually but never entirely extinguished or calmed down? ~Alexandre Vinet
Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
Prose is poetry that can't stop talking. ~Terri Guillemets, "Chatterbox," 1996, terriguillemets.com
Mr Witwould: Pray, madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters? I find I must keep copies.
Mrs Millamant: Only with those in verse... I never pin up my hair with prose.
~William Congreve, The Way of the World, 1700
Prose-poetry is usually the refuge of writers who are unsuccessful as poets, and Joyce — though one of the greatest mere athletes in language there has ever been — was no true poet... ~Percival Arland Ussher (1899-1980), "James Joyce: Doubting Thomist and Joking Jesuit," Three Great Irishmen, 1953
Poetry: Praise & Passion
Truth shines the brighter clad in Verse... ~Jonathan Swift, "To Stella," 1720
Poetry... simple, sensuous and passionate. ~John Milton, "Of Education. To Mr. Samuel Hartlib," c.1650
My thirst and passion from boyhood... has been for poetry — for poetry in its widest and wildest sense — for poetry untrammelled by the laws of sense, rhyme, or rhythm, soaring through the universe, and echoing the music of the spheres! From my youth, nay, from my very cradle, I have yearned for poetry, for beauty, for novelty, for romancement. ~Lewis Carroll
A poet looks at the world somewhat as a man looks at a woman. ~Wallace Stevens
Spirit of Verse! in deepest reverence
I bow before thine ever-glorious shrine;
Thee I have loved with passion most intense;
And though I feel thy meeds can ne'er be mine,
Yet may I pour one low and gentle line...
~Charles Swain, "Poesy," in The Literary Magnet, June 1826
"The Seven Seas," by Rudyard Kipling... I know of no volume of modern poetry which has so much backbone in it as this... These are no sonnets to ladies' eyebrows, but poems of blood and iron, of laughter and tears, of great tragedies, of the kaleidoscopic variety of human life, of broad-embracing arms which cover the gamut of human emotions; they are poems to live with us, to hold before us... they are the ruddy drops from the heart of a great poet who has had the courage to discard certain poetical conventions, and who, in so doing, has stretched out the hand of brotherhood to millions... ~"Diary of a Bookseller,"
How happy it made her! And what beautiful things these poets always thought of and said! ~S. J. Adair Fitz-Gerald (1859–1925), The Zankiwank & The Bletherwitch, 1896
Put all your faith in poets. You will find few others to share Beauty with you; and it cannot be borne alone. ~Christopher Morley
I do not know whether the literary associations of the room had any part — probably they had — in determining the current of my thought, but I remember that, during the first few hours of the morning preceding my death, I found my mind running on poets and poetry. I recollect that I was thinking chiefly of Rossetti, and of the fact that he was haunted, as he lay a-dying, by passages from his own poems. Not that I saw or see any cause in that fact for wonder, for I can recall lines of his which I can believe would haunt one even in heaven. ~Coulson Kernahan, A Dead Man's Diary, 1890
...the soul is stirred by a simple sentence in the god-like language of Shakespeare, or is as irresistibly swayed as are trees in a whirlwind by a single stanza from Swinburne... the magic witchery of a couplet by Keats can bring tears to the eyes... the tender grace of a line from Herrick can set the senses vibrating with an exquisite thrill of joy. ~Coulson Kernahan, A Dead Man's Diary, 1890
...those poets whose effusions entranced my soul, and lifted it to heaven. ~Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley (1797–1851), Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, 1818
I wanted to meet you — the man who first read Mr F. Scott Fitzgerald and said: "Yes, the world needs poets! My God! Someone publish this bastard, 'cause the world needs poets. Or why even live?" ~Genius, film, 2016, based on the 1978 book Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg, screenplay by John Logan [Thomas Wolfe to Mr Perkins]
I think poetry is the greatest of the arts. It combines music and painting and story-telling and prophecy and the dance. It is religious in tone, scientific in attitude. A true poem contains the seed of wonder... ~E. B. White
Poetry — even bad poetry — may be our final hope. ~Edward Abbey
...the terrified little poets
Gaping and gasping at your table, while
You talk like your own poems, splintering
Colours hard and clean as onyx, spinning
Phrases in prismatic whorls that flicker
Jewels of fire at all facets, blazing
Through books and obscure regions of the brain
And dusty archives till they burst in flame...
For eminence and the pure thunder of thought
And the word coiled up like lightning and the love
Of audience to defeat the taste of ashes,
Gray roses, brittle vials of vinegar...
Here you might brood over a dim desire
And watch the word fulfilling it begin
To stir and spread and palpitate like some
Slow glow-worm staining the darkness in your garden...
~Joseph Auslander, "Letter to Amy Lowell," 1920s
All poets named Edna St. Vincent Millay are major. ~E.B. White, "How to Tell a Major Poet from a Minor Poet," 1930
The world is just full of poetry, isn't it...? ~L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Ingleside, 1939
Poetry: Eating
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
~Mark Strand, "Eating Poetry," Reasons for Moving, 1968
I have supped on poetry. ~Octave Mirbeau, A Chambermaid's Diary, 1891–1900, translated from the French by Benjamin R. Tucker
The girl born this month will flash like a streak of yellow sunshine... She will have poetry for breakfast, and spend the rest of the day on zephyrs and chocolate caramels. ~Josh Billings, "Horoskope for July," Farmer's Allminax for the Year of Our Lord 1872 [spelling standardized
I'm quite hungry. Feed me poems, please.
Every healthy man can do without food for two days — but without poetry, never! ~Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), translated from French
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. Virgil, if I remember right, refers to it several times, but with too much Roman restraint. He does not let himself go on cheese. Except Virgil and the anonymous rhymer of "If all the trees were bread and cheese," I can recall no verse about cheese. Yet it has every quality which we require in exalted poetry. It is a short, strong word, and it rhymes to "breeze" and "seas." Cheese has also variety, the very soul of song. ~G. K. Chesterton
Oh, of course I know that ‘ate’ ain’t good etiquette in that place... It should be ‘eat.’ But ‘eat’ don’t rhyme, an’ ‘ate’ does. So I’m goin’ to use it. An’ I can, anyhow. It’s poem license; an’ that ’ll let you do anything. ~Eleanor H. Porter, "Dad," Dawn, 1918
["Supper's ready, supper's ready,
Hurry up, or you'll be late,
Then you'll sure be cross and heady
If there's nothin' left to ate."
By all means give us as much truth as possible, even though the dose is ever so bitter... Truth, man! truth is the only true poetry, if the business of poetry is to move the feelings... [B]read and meat... are facts... Bread and truth are all man wants; and a loaf is only an eatable lump of truth fitted for the body, as truth is the invisible, but no less substantial, bread of the spirit. ~John Sterling
We should nourish our Souls on the dew of Poesy, and manure them as well. ~Logan Pearsall Smith
A poet cannot have one style only, or, rather, cannot always season every dish with the same sauce. ~Jean Cocteau
[I]t is well we [poets] should be contented with posthumous fame, but impossible to be so with posthumous bread and cheese. ~Robert Southey, 1808 [Conklin's paraphrase: "A poet may live on posthumous fame, but not on posthumous bread and cheese."
[In thinking about poetry] I forgot all about food. Indeed it seemed that it might not be a bad thing to miss a meal. ~Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), Kusamakura, 1906, translated from the Japanese by Alan Turney, The Three Cornered World, 1965
Poetry: Drunkenness & Alcohol
It is vain for the sober man to knock at poesy's door. ~Plato
If you follow old Cratinus, my learned Maecenas, no poems can please long, nor live, which are written by water-drinkers. From the moment Liber enlisted
My Lord, if what Cratinus says be right,
Those Verses cannot live, those Lines delight,
Which Water-drinkers Pen, in vain they write.
For e'er since Bacchus did in wild design,
With Fauns and Satyrs half-mad Poets join,
The Muses every Morning smelt of Wine.
~Horace, translated by Thomas Creech, 1684
[My poems are] slow wine from a life lived in flux, not fury... the product of a compelling need to convert to a degree of ordered form the raw must that has accumulated inside. ~Cave Outlaw
Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.
And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: ‘It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.’ ~Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), “Be Drunken,” translated from French by Arthur Symons
the smell of ink is
intoxicating to me —
others may have wine
but I have poetry
~Terri Guillemets, "Inkdreaming," 1994, terriguillemets.com
I was but a drunken poet...
In the evenings in the garden
How we kissed behind the lilacs!
While the scent of wine was mingled
With the perfume of the smilax.
King nor queen had e'er such pleasure
Out of love — the high Gods know it!
She was just a pretty waitress,
I a mad and drunken poet.
~Robinson Jeffers, "From Fenestrella's"
These poets, who get drunk with sun, and weep
Because the night or a woman's face is fair...
~Amy Levy, "A Minor Poet," c. 1884
...I have sat,
In days, when sensibility was young,
And the heart beat responsive to the sight,
The touch, and music of the lovely one;
Yes, I have sat entranced, enraptured, till
The spirit would have utterance, and words
Flowed full of hope, and love, and melody,
The gushings of an overburdened heart
Drunk with enchantment, bursting freely forth,
Like fountains in the early days of spring.
~James G. Percival (1795–1856), "Love of Study," c.1822 [Percival was a surgeon, geologist, chemistry professor, poet, dictionary editor, and book collector!
My poems are love-drunk letters to the universe. ~Terri Guillemets
The painter who likes to paint trees, becoming a tree. Children carry within them a natural drug... All children possess the magic power of being able to change themselves into what they wish. Poets, in whom childhood is prolonged, suffer a great deal when they lose this power. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons which drives the poet to use opium. ~Jean Cocteau
Poetry: Feelings & Emotions
Poetry is emotion put into measure. ~Thomas Hardy
It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness. It finds its thought and succeeds, or doesn't find it and comes to nothing. ~Robert Frost
The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse. ~Henry David Thoreau, journal, 1851
The poet, though seeing every seam,
Loves the world as no other being —
Feeling beauty rather than seeing.
~Cave Outlaw (1900–1996), "Sense of Beauty," Each Day, 1942
Time has proved that the function of poetry is not to impart messages, but to explore the depths of emotion. ~Arthur Davison Ficke, "The Nature of Poetry," 1926
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words. This may sound easy. It isn't.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling... [W]henever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine... [N]othing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we're not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed. ~E.E. Cummings, "A Poet's Advice to Students," 1955
In order that words be poetical they should be warm with the fire of the soul, or moist with its breath. ~Joseph Joubert, translated by George H. Calvert
The form, colour, music, and beauty of expression of many of these songs may be discussed, analysed, and set forth, yet the secret of their spell remains inaccessible. You are reduced to the forlorn plight of all those sanguine spirits who have attempted the definition of poetry. There is an incommunicable magic in poetry which is foolishness to the multitude. Poetry is to be felt... ~Author unknown, review of Songs, Ballads, and a Garden Play by A. Mary F. Robinson, 1888
I like your poetry very much... Very much, indeed... It almost makes me want to cry. ~Hughes Mearns, Richard Richard, 1916
The poet... is walking on a quicksand, and from time to time plunges his leg into the jaws of death. He gets used to this, however, and soon looks upon it as quite normal... ~Jean Cocteau
The bird is sad
And so it cries.
Men are silent
Who are wise;
They hide the griefs
That at them pull.
But they make
Nothing beautiful.
~Mary Carolyn Davies, "An Apology for Poets," Youth Riding, 1919
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know. Is there any other way? ~Emily Dickinson, 1870, quoted by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Poetry feeds on the purest substance of the sentiments of the soul. It quenches its thirst with a nectar that has no dregs. ~Alexandre Vinet
Poetry is my sole happiness... Where would I go for comfort in this dark hour if not to the poets? ~Marion Hill, Harmony Hall, 1910
The poets are ill guides to love. Their passions are half-fantastic, if not of imagination all compact... Shelley's "Epipsychidion" was the expression of a passing mood; Tennyson's "Come into the Garden, Maud," a lyric exaltation that must have died down when Maud appeared... Swinburne sings of phantasms... These poets used their goddesses as mystic inspirers. Dante was not in love with Beatrice, the daughter of Portinari, but with his own imagination... ~Israel Zangwill
If the Spectrist wishes to describe a landscape, he will not attempt a map, but will put down those winged emotions, those fantastic analogies, which the real scene awakens in his own mind. In practice this will be found to be the vividest of all modes of communication... ~Anne Knish (Arthur Davison Ficke), Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments, 1916 [farce
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly. ~Frederick W. Robertson, lecture delivered before the Members of the Mechanics' Institution, February 1852
Poetry... implies a predisposition to the supernatural. The hypersensitive atmosphere in which it envelops us sharpens our secret sensibilities, and causes us to put out feelers which probe into depths which our official senses ignore. The scents which rise from these forbidden regions make our official senses jealous. They rise in revolt, exhaust themselves, attempt to do work which is beyond their power, and the individual is overcome by a marvellous confusion. Beware! Whoever finds himself in such a state may see miracles in everything.
Poets live on miracles... But let a miracle fail to happen, and their nervous tension relaxes, their senses calm down again. It is as if the magic ring had fallen from their suddenly shrunken finger. These are painful periods. Poetry, like a drug, continues to act, but turns against the poet and torments him with a series of misadventures. ~Jean Cocteau
To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion — a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only. ~George Eliot
Poetry is the natural language of excited feeling. ~Frederick W. Robertson, lecture delivered before the Members of the Mechanics' Institution, February 1852
I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state? ~Lord Byron
And there is pleasure in the utterance
Of pleasant images in pleasant words,
Melting like melody into the ear...
It is joy ineffable to dwell upon lines
That register our feelings, and portray,
In colors always fresh and ever new,
Emotions that were sanctified, and loved,
As something far too tender, and too pure,
For forms so frail and fading...
~James G. Percival (1795–1856), "Love of Study," c.1822
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. ~T. S. Eliot
A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words. Some poems took years to find their words. ~Robert Frost
I am searching for my feelings
through shelves of dusty books
can't help but feel I've left them
in some forgotten ancient nooks
as if an author long before me
captured my emotions in his day
and saved them in fine poetry
for future me to find someway
~Terri Guillemets, terriguillemets.com
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. ~Oscar Wilde
Poetry: Madness & Sanity
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads to madness. The poet is the Pandora of the mind. ~Christopher Morley
Poet, madman, or lover — all three should be one and the same thing... ~Marie Corelli, A Romance of Two Worlds, "Chapter IX: An Electric Shock," 1886
We Poets in our youth begin in gladness:
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
~William Wordsworth
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind, if any thing which gives so much pleasure ought to be called unsoundness... Truth, indeed, is essential to poetry; but it is the truth of madness. The reasonings are just; but the premises are false. After the first suppositions have been made, every thing out to be consistent; but those first suppositions require a degree of credulity which almost amounts to a partial and temporary derangement of the intellect. Hence of all people children are the most imaginative. They abandon themselves without reserve to every illusion. ~Thomas Babington Macaulay
...every poet worthy of the name being a miniature schizophrenic. ~Jean Cocteau
Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom... Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine... Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion... The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. it is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. ~G. K. Chesterton, "The Maniac," 1908
I have thought
Too long and darkly, till my brain became,
In its own eddy boiling and o'erwrought,
A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame.
I am half mad
Between metaphysics, mountains, lakes,
Love unextinguishable, thoughts unutterable,
And the nightmare of my own delinquencies.
~Lord Byron
Reading Poetry
He who draws noble delights from the sentiment of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life. ~George Sand
The pleasure that poetry gives is that of imagining more than is written; the task is divided between the poet and his reader. ~Alexandre Vinet
When I feel inclined to read poetry, I take down my Dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes
In order to read poetry one must be inspired. ~Jean Cocteau
It is delightful to steep ourselves in poetry. ~Alexandre Vinet
Compression of poetry is so great I often explode. Out of the house to walk off a poem. ~William Corbett, "On Reading: Notes & a Poem," The Agni Review, No. 22, 1985
"What are you going to read—something of Tennyson?"... And with a honeysuckle that Margaret remembered, for a bookmark, he found the place he wanted, and opened at "Elaine," that loveliest of the idyls, and began to read.... It was a charmed hour. Lawrence Brook was a fine reader, and delighted in poetry. It touched his own heart, and had power over him, and so he received the power himself to touch all other hearts the same. Even the first three lines came to Margaret as a revelation of something fair in life she had not recognized, and her hands paused in their work, and her earnest eyes and breathless attention followed Lawrence Brook with every word he uttered.... Her quick imagination and sensitive heart seized upon the poem and its beauty as if it were a gift which now might be possessed forever. ~August Bell, "Quicksands of Love," 1887
What if some lover in a far-off Spring,
Down the long-passage of a hundred years,
Should breathe his longing through the words I sing—
~Arthur Davison Ficke, Sonnets of a Portrait-Painter, 1914
A poem is the reverse of all that a man usually regards as the best way of expressing what he thinks. One must therefore be very humble in order to read a poem and not fight against it as though it were an enemy. ~Jean Cocteau
Happiness is sharing a bowl of cherries and a book of poetry with a shade tree. ~Terri Guillemets
Poetry always causes a scandal. It is a stroke of luck that nobody notices it. It only becomes visible, alas, a long time afterwards, when events imitate it and disturb the world. ~Jean Cocteau
Writing Poetry
...lyrical poems, deriving from everywhere and nowhere as is the case with all poetry... ~Amy Lowell, 1919
...for I do write in rhyme and meter, such being my nature. ~Arthur Guiterman, A Poet's Proverbs, 1924
I am free to write at last...
I tremble like a guilty thing…
I have been in the machine so long, I am naked and afraid out of it…
Every morning millions of people go to work,
They earn an honest living…
What right have I to sit in a room and play with rhymes?
~James Oppenheim, The Mystic Warrior, 1921
Nine-tenths of the great mass of poetry are spent in vain searches after false glitter, in technical polish, in rounding periods, and searching for similes and metaphors. Let them regard matter, and not manner; and by degrees sound and deep thoughts will come abundantly and easily. ~Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, 1st Baronet, "Poetry — The Modern Poets," in Fraser's Magazine, October 1834
Apollinaire chanted his poems while writing them and they enchant us. These old-fashioned secrets are more worthwhile than Aristotle. ~Jean Cocteau
Allegra licked pensively at the ink stain on her poetic white forefinger. ~Marion Hill, Harmony Hall, 1910
Now what should I do in this place
But sit and count the chimes,
And splash cold water on my face
And spoil a page with rhymes?
~Dorothy Parker, "A Well-Worn Story," 1925
But the poet is not only aware of his material: he has the most curious feeling that it has already been selected for him. ~Christopher Morley, Inward Ho!, 1923
If you have not a bird inside you,
You have no reason to sing.
But if a pent bird chide you,
A beak and a bleeding wing,
Then you have reason to sing.
If merely you are clever
With thoughts and rhymes and words,
Then always your poems sever
The veins of our singing-birds,
With blades of glinting words.
Yet if a Song, without ending,
Inside you choke for breath,
And a beak, devouring, rending,
Tear through your lungs for breath,
Sing—or you bleed to death.
~Louis Golding (1895–1958), Sorrow of War, 1919
And take back ill-polished stanzas to the anvil. ~Horace, as quoted in James Wood, Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources, 1893
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
~Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012), "Possibilities," 1997, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak
I know how poems come;
They have wings.
When you are not thinking of it
I suddenly say,
"Mother, a poem!"
Somehow I hear it rustling.
Poems come like boats
With sails for wings;
Crossing the sky swiftly
They slip under tall bridges
Of cloud.
~Hilda Conkling, "Poems"
Some poets would rather write than be President. ~"Poor Richard Junior's Philosophy," The Saturday Evening Post, 1903, George Horace Lorimer, editor
Then, again, there is a fear of something inside me…
There is a supernatural fear…
I fear the Daemon that rules the poet
And that sways him like a banner in the winds of inspiration…
I am afraid to let go… there is some taboo I must break…
~James Oppenheim, The Mystic Warrior, 1921
A poet... is possessed by a thousand devils whom he must obey. ~Jean Cocteau
Beauty limps. Poetry limps. The poet limps when he emerges from wrestling with the angel. The poet draws his charm from this limping.... If poetry did not limp it would run and it cannot run because it counts its steps and interrupts them with halts. ~Jean Cocteau
...since a lunch was cancelled because of the snow, I was suddenly given a few hours of unexpected time and managed to get down a poem that had been pursuing me for days. ~May Sarton, 1971
An acorn sprouts two ways: one shoot downward into earth, one upward into leaves and sunlight. So, please, with poems. Every poem-bulb gropes doubly: rooting toward the rich soil of truth, lifting into the free air of beauty. ~Christopher Morley
A poem should be made to cast off, one by one, all the ropes attaching it to whatever was the source, or motive, of its creation. Each time the poet cuts a rope his heart beats. When he has cut the last one, the poem detaches itself, and rises, unaided, like a balloon, carrying its own beauty with it, having severed all connection with the earth. ~Jean Cocteau
[I]f poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all. ~John Keats, 1818
You must know love as well as poetry.
I hate those lukewarm authors, whose forc'd fire
In a cold style describe a hot desire,
That sigh by rule, and raging in cold blood
Their sluggish muse whip to an amorous mood:
Their feign'd transports appear but flat and vain;
They always sigh, and always hug their chain,
Adore their prison, and their sufferings bless,
Make sense and reason quarrel as they please...
~Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711), "The Art of Poetry," 1683, translated by John Dryden (1631–1700)
To be a poet, you must have something to say. Poetry is not just a crisp, frosty spatter of words. Let your form come out of your emotion, not out of your conscious reason and intellectual consideration. Forget the polyphonic zig-zags and colored noise and pretty tinsel. Don't be that literary sword-swallower who tries to produce roses, laurel, chrysanthemums, firecrackers, Chinese dragons, gargoyles, and cider apples, all on one bush. ~E. Merrill Root, 1924 [Modified. I've rewritten this criticism of Amy Lowell into general advice.
Any method is good that produces a good poem. ~Helen Smith Bevington (1906–2001), When Found, Make a Verse Of, 1961
Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It's as though I could fly, almost, and I get very tense before I've told the truth — hard. Then I sit down at the desk and get going with it. ~Anne Sexton, Writers at Work (The Paris Review), interview with Barbara Kevles, 1968
My body was once a beautiful house of marble...
Health-giving crimson blood in steady tides.
My eyes were then quick to see and to welcome beauty...
My blood lies in great black lakes now, sluggish and frozen...
My eyes are bleared now and dull with sleepless midnights...
But in my brain there seethes an adulterous hotchpotch
Of poems clean and disgusting, mad and sage;
And pain, like a dry fire, keeps them ever a-boiling
Till they splash over and blacken some wasted page...
~John Gould Fletcher, "The Poet, II"
Never think yourself singular, never think your own case much harder than other people's. I admit that the age we live in makes this difficult. For the first time in history there are readers — a large body of people, occupied in business, in sport, in nursing their grandfathers, in tying up parcels behind counters — they all read now; and they want to be told how to read and what to read; and their teachers — the reviewers, the lecturers, the broadcasters — must in all humanity make reading easy for them; assure them that literature is violent and exciting, full of heroes and villains; of hostile forces perpetually in conflict; of fields strewn with bones; of solitary victors riding off on white horses wrapped in black cloaks to meet their death at the turn of the road. A pistol shot rings out. "The age of romance was over. The age of realism had begun" — you know the sort of thing. Now of course writers themselves know very well that there is not a word of truth in all this — there are no battles, and no murders and no defeats and no victories. But as it is of the utmost importance that readers should be amused, writers acquiesce. They dress themselves up. They act their parts. One leads; the other follows. One is romantic, the other realist. One is advanced, the other out of date. There is no harm in it, so long as you take it as a joke, but once you believe in it, once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody. Think of yourself rather as something much humbler and less spectacular, but to my mind far more interesting — a poet in whom live all the poets of the past, from whom all poets in time to come will spring. You have a touch of Chaucer in you, and something of Shakespeare; Dryden, Pope, Tennyson — to mention only the respectable among your ancestors — stir in your blood and sometimes move your pen a little to the right or to the left. In short you are an immensely ancient, complex, and continuous character, for which reason please treat yourself with respect and think twice before you dress up as Guy Fawkes and spring out upon timid old ladies at street corners, threatening death and demanding twopence-halfpenny. ~Virginia Woolf, letter to John Lehmann, 1931
...submitting to a process of incredible severity (which the reader mistakes for laziness)... ~Jean Cocteau
Emily: So I can just have time to myself.
Vinnie: Time to yourself? To do what?
Emily: To take dictation from God.
Vinnie to Maggie: My sister's a poet.
~Alena Smith and Rachel Axler, “I have never seen ‘Volcanoes,’” Dickinson, 2019
The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced. Therefore is a word the poet must not know, which exists only in the mind. ~André Gide
I ain't much on poets
And that kind of truck,
And I don't know of any guy
I'd rather sock
Than one of these sleepy fellers
That talk of misty seas
And that kind of rot;
Yet I dunno,
I'd even be him,
If I could say
You talked like some kind of bird;
Or may be
That your throat to me were like
White violets.
~Willard Maas, "Admiration," 1926
Abyss borne through a fog of crystals
By the hornet's cloud of the poet's silence...
~Stéphane Mallarmé, "Funeral Toast"
Once you've got a good notion with pith
Then you rhyme it with something like "myth,"
Rhyming on a bit more
In lines three and four
Matching up with the first in the fifth.
~Anthony Euwer, "Definition of the Limerick," The Limeratomy, 1917
Poets smoke nature and beauty and angst and exhale swirling plumes of poetry. ~Terri Guillemets
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. ~Jean Cocteau
the poem nests in my soul
until it flies away
on a feathery quill
~Terri Guillemets, "Fledglings," 2009
A poet carrying a thought from his mind into expression is like a child bearing a bucket brimming with water from the well to the house,—part of the contents is spilled. ~Austin O'Malley (1858–1932), Thoughts of a Recluse, 1898
On the floor of your mind, then — is it not this that makes you a poet? — rhythm keeps up its perpetual beat. Sometimes it seems to die down to nothing; it lets you eat, sleep, talk like other people. Then it swells again and rises and attempts to sweep all the contents of your mind into one dominant dance. Tonight is such an occasion. Although you are alone, and have taken one boot off and are about to undo the other, you cannot go on with the process of undressing, but must instantly write at the bidding of the dance. You snatch pen and paper; you hardly trouble to hold the one or to straighten the other. And while you write, while the first stanzas of the dance are being fastened down, I will withdraw a little and look out of the window. A woman passes, then a man; a car glides to a stop and then — but there is no need to say what I see out of the window, nor indeed is there time, for I am suddenly recalled from my observations by a cry of rage or despair. Your page is crumpled in a ball; your pen sticks upright by the nib in the carpet... You are rasped, jarred, thoroughly out of temper. And if I am to guess the reason, it is, I should say, that the rhythm which was opening and shutting with a force that sent shocks of excitement from your head to your heels has encountered some hard and hostile object upon which it has smashed itself to pieces. Something has worked in which cannot be made into poetry; some foreign body, angular, sharp-edged, gritty, has refused to join the dance...
The poet as I guess has strained himself to include an emotion that is not domesticated and acclimatized to poetry; the effort has thrown him off his balance; he rights himself... by a violent recourse to the poetical — he invokes the moon or the nightingale. Anyhow, the transition is sharp. The poem is cracked in the middle. Look, it comes apart in my hands: here is reality on one side, here is beauty on the other; and instead of acquiring a whole object rounded and entire, I am left with broken parts in my hands... ~Virginia Woolf, letter to John Lehmann, 1931
...all these processes take place slowly and painfully, straining the nervous system to breaking-point. It is absolutely essential that one's thoughts should beat as one's heart beats... ~Jean Cocteau
Inhale infinity,
Exhale ink.
~Terri Guillemets
The aim of poetry is to capture those rare moments of the poet's experience when, for good or for evil, the consciousness of life sweeps through him like a flame… the moments when he becomes passionately aware of the crises of his spirit's secret drama, and sees a pattern taking shape in the void, and words of utterance come singing to his lips. Out of that dizzy instant he emerges, bewildered but excitedly hopeful, bringing with him his poem. Here, he says, is a curious glimmering thing that I discovered far down in the sea of my dimly conscious spirit: perhaps it will have a fascination for you, too; perhaps you, too, will see in its pale sphere some hint of the iridescent lights that played on its surface when in those vast deeps I found it. That iridescence, if it lasts, is what we call beauty. ~Arthur Davison Ficke, "The Nature of Poetry," 1926
Sometimes silence is absent-minded. Too late! The poem is there. ~Jean Cocteau
Poetry: Translation
POETRY. — The language in which the Book of Nature is written — they who can translate it are called poets. ~"A Chapter of Definitions," Daily Crescent, 1848 June 23rd
A poem is not written in the language used by the poet. Poetry is a language of its own and cannot be translated into any other, even into that in which it seems to have been written. ~Jean Cocteau
For not only is the poet is a translator of the inner life of man, with its wonder world of thoughts and feelings — its unspeakable love and sorrow, its hopes and aspirations, temptations and lonely wrestlings, darings and doubts, grim passions and gentle affections, its smiles and tears — which, in their changeful lights or gloomy grandeur, play out the great drama of the human heart, but he also translates into his poetry and reflects for us the very spirit of his time. ~Gerald Massey, "Poetry — The Spasmodists," The North British Review, 1858
Poetry is what gets lost in translation. ~Robert Frost
The panorama of Naples took rank above everything else. "No wonder the poets tried so hard to tell us about this," she spoke finally.
"But I do wonder," he returned. "How could they be such egotists. No writing can do justice to that... It can't be translated. All landscape poetry is a failure, a failure from the start. It can't be conveyed to others."
"Perhaps," she mused, "the poet was not interested in others. Perhaps he wished merely to celebrate himself." ~Hughes Mearns, Richard Richard, 1916
A poem sings with a bad accent in any language not its own. ~Austin O'Malley (1858–1932), Thoughts of a Recluse, 1898
A translation of a poem is like a plastercast of a statue or a photograph of a painting; and the better the translation the poorer the original poem. ~Austin O'Malley (1858–1932), Thoughts of a Recluse, 1898
A poet can translate birdsong much more faithfully than the biologist ever could. ~Terri Guillemets, "Essence," 2004, terriguillemets.com
Poetry: Understanding
Elizabeth Barrett: Oh, but those poems! — with their glad and great-hearted acceptance of life.... Sometimes there are passages… I've marked one or two in your "Sordello" which rather puzzled me.
'All petals, no prickles
No prickles like trickles.'
Robert Browning: Well, Miss Barrett, when that passage was written only God and Robert Browning understood it. Now, only God understands it.
~The Barretts of Wimpole Street [This wording is from the 1934 movie, but it is quite similar in wording to the 1930 Rudolf Besier play the movie is based on; the screenplay writers are Ernest Vajda, Claudine West, and Donald Ogden Stewart. Browning has a poem "Another Way of Love" that reads thus: "...All petals, no prickles, / Delicious as trickles / Of wine poured at mass-time..." And another which reads "God is the perfect poet..."
The great nineteenth-century writers — Hawthorne and Melville, Thoreau and Emerson, Twain and James — were skeptics, transcendentalists, and humanists, and not even God knows what Emily Dickinson was. ~The Georgia Review, c.1947
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand. ~Plato
Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge
It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively) that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. ~T. S. Eliot, "Dante"
Gerard Hopkins's poetry contains everything that poetry must not contain if it is to be popular, much quoted and often anthologized. It is preternaturally obscure and strongly metaphysical; its metrical peculiarities are so pronounced as to render its reading difficult, even for the technically equipped reader of poetry. The author's gloss and a dozen readings are necessary to a full savoring of Hopkins's more involved passages. Yet notwithstanding these checks and hindrances to easy assimilation, the tug of Hopkins's poetry draws the reader on through grammatical quagmires and over metrical hurdles to an immediate pleasure and a lasting remembrance of intense poetical energy. Soon... one grows accustomed to the author's syntax and diction; his bell of prosody rings clear; the terrain of strange language becomes familiar; the spirit of the poetry quickens, and our wonder climbs with each new reading. ~Henry Morton Robinson, "Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Preface," 1927
No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins
My poetry is quite confusing
To some; to me it's most amusing...
~John Kendrick Bangs and Frank Dempster Sherman, New Waggings of Old Tales, by Two Wags, 1888
...the Poet recognizes that he is addicted to confusion... ~John Kendrick Bangs and Frank Dempster Sherman, New Waggings of Old Tales, by Two Wags, 1888
If a poet writes in gibberish, his soul yet understands.
Is there such a thing as pure unmingled poetry, poetry independent of meaning? 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
A poem should not mean
But be.
~Archibald MacLeish
In poetry what matters is neither what is said, nor the way in which it is said, nor the meaning, nor the music. Something else matters and it cannot be analysed. ~Jean Cocteau
"I'm a little daft on Whitman," he apologized.
"So am I."
"You don't think he is immoral?" he asked incredulously.
"I think he is super-moral."
"You do know him then," he admitted, half-aloud.
~Hughes Mearns, Richard Richard, 1916
When Cecil wrote poetry, he felt quite noble, — and dreadfully misunderstood. ~Jeanie Gwynne Bettany, "A Laggard in Love," 1890
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood. ~Jean Cocteau
Poetic writing can be understood and misunderstood in many ways. In most cases the author is not the right authority to decide on where the reader ceases to understand and the misunderstanding begins. Many an author has found readers to whom his work seemed more lucid than it was to himself. Moreover, misunderstandings may be fruitful under certain circumstances. ~Hermann Hesse, "Author's Note," 1961, to Steppenwolf, 1927, translated by Joseph Mileck and Horst Frenz, 1963
Did you think that yourself was the only lifelong companion you could ever have? Did you believe that you, solitary you, were the only one who would ever quite understand you? And did you sometimes weary even of that unbearable intimate? All the while the poets knew: they were waiting for you round the corner. Your terrors and disgusts were theirs, too... They, too, have wooed life with good heart... have shaken off (for a moment) the heavy armour of triviality; have dared to put away mere laughter — that they might, a little later, laugh with added gust. ~Christopher Morley
I have never seen Victor Rendal's face,
But I know him, I know him...
How should I not know him?
We have gone a long way together, he and I,
Beyond space, beyond time;
He has been with me in the still, mysterious places;
Through the unhappy days,
When I thought I was alone,
He was there beside me,
Thinking my thoughts.
He knows my secret;
If I were to tell him he would understand...
He is Victor Rendal,
The poet,
And I am only Elizabeth.
It is wonderful
That I should have a secret that he knows,
And that I should read it there
In his poems.
~May Sinclair, The Dark Night, 1924
Still he is a man of fine powers and feelings; for next to being a great poet is the power of understanding one, — of finding one's self in him, as we Germans say." ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion
Friends often imagine our poems to be just notes, jotted down haphazard... ~Jean Cocteau
Poetry: Self & Soul
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. ~W. B. Yeats
Every poet is posthumous. This is why it is very difficult for him to live. His work hates him, it eats him, it wants to get rid of him and live alone as it pleases. If he comes to the fore, his voices leave him. ~Jean Cocteau
The poet illuminates us by the flames in which his being passes away. ~Alexandre Vinet
You know I live for work, — for poetry.
Let yourself become living poetry. ~Rumi, interpreted by Coleman Barks
...there I was immersed in that blissful state of self-forgetfulness which is itself poetry. ~Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), Kusamakura, 1906, translated from the Japanese by Alan Turney, The Three Cornered World, 1965
The true poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
I'm not a man to murmur; the ills that flesh is heir to I have always borne with calm philosophy. I can smile even now, sir, as a poor faded flower might smile on the edge of a precipice — in the rain. You catch the simile, I hope? I was a poet once, and metaphor is still a strong point with me, if so hapless a wretch may be allowed to have any strong points about him — brain excepted. ~F. W. Robinson, "The Man Who Married a Voice," Women Are Strange, and Other Stories, 1883
The poet is never a teacher, but always a learner. His poem is a venture at perilous discovery. The fact of writing is not the recording of something already known to the poet; it is his method of bringing to the light things that were previously in darkness for him. ~Arthur Davison Ficke, "The Nature of Poetry," 1926
I am a poet and a mystery,
Each day myself as in a glass I see:
Creator and created fused in one,
Sun that makes night and night that drinks the sun.
~John Gould Fletcher, "The Poet"
...all a poet has to do is to play a sort of game of chess with himself... ~Jean Cocteau
You rise early in the morning and go outdoors to make a before-breakfast circuit of the house and snuff the garden air ingrained with gold. But though you think yourself taking the day by the prime, it is already old to the birds. Their airy brawling, reduplicated chirrup and tweetling, their almost crazy jargoneering, has been going on for hours. So it is in the tree-tops of the mind. However delicious to yourself these musings about poetry, all has been said before. This, then, is perhaps the sovereign tribute to poetry, that though you may have read all the argument from Sir Philip Sidney down to Santayana and Sandburg, yet you are still driven to formulate your happiness for yourself. This is not easy. Like John Donne at his prayers,
"Sometimes I finde that I had forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a feare of
The sense of poetry is closely akin to that absent-mindedness. Poetry might almost be defined as what you are really thinking about when you believe yourself to be thinking of something else. It is a wash of quicksilver at the back of the mind, which turns that window into a mirror. The modern interest in the
The poet is not to be condemned, rather pitied, for his furious egotism.
Cries the poet every day:
Ego, mei, mihi, me!
~Christopher Morley, Inward Ho!, 1923
[P]oetry... the spontaneous fusion of hitherto unrelated words. Such things must take place in your own head, by your own chemistry. ~Marie Emilie Gilchrist (1893–1989), Writing Poetry: Suggestions for Young Writers, 1932
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some with you. ~Joseph Joubert, translated by George H. Calvert
He who has no poetry in himself will find poetry in nothing. ~Joseph Joubert, translated by Katharine Lyttleton
What became of his poetry after he had spun his soul into verse, nobody could tell. ~F. W. Robinson, A Bridge of Glass, 1872
Poetry: Publishing
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. ~Don Marquis
Poetry is not dead; it is merely buried at the bottom of magazine pages. ~"Poor Richard Junior's Philosophy," The Saturday Evening Post, 1904, George Horace Lorimer, editor
There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either. ~Robert Graves, c.1950s
Although a literary man, you will be astonished to learn that never a penny have I earned by my pen, but never a penny, let me avow, have I ever cared to earn. Poems of my own composition I wrote for myself alone. ~F. W. Robinson, "The Man Who Married a Voice," Women Are Strange, and Other Stories, 1883
Poetry of my kind is not popular enough nowadays, you know, to sell. ~Hart Crane, 1925
A poet can survive everything but a misprint. ~Oscar Wilde, 1886 [So true! It's an agonizing stab to the heart.
I am a very particular person about having all I write printed as I write it. I require to see a proof, a revise, a re-revise, and a double re-revise, or fourth-proof rectified impression of all my productions, especially verse. A misprint kills a sensitive author. An intentional change of his text murders him. No wonder so many poets die young! ~Oliver Wendell Holmes
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it. ~W. H. Auden
The hallway was deserted,
There was terror in the air;
I stood alone and trembled
On the seven-hundredth stair;
My throat was parched and breathless,
And the speech I'd learned had fled;
I knew my quest was hopeless
In this "Temple of the Dead."
'Twas but an office building,
Where a grim man sat in state,
With shears and active pencil
To decide his callers' fate.
The dead were budding poets,—
Story-writers,—even worse;
And they all took silent journeys
In the literary hearse.
~W. Dayton Wegefarth (1885–1973), "The Literary Hearse," Smiles and Sighs, 1910
A sold poem loses half its meaning. ~Terri Guillemets
It has been truly said that though the printer's ink should dry up, ten thousand melodious tongues would preserve the songs of Burns to remote generations. ~William Cunningham, "The Immortal Memory of Robert Burns," 1859
Many an aspiring young poet is convinced that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an editor to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. ~"Poor Richard Junior's Philosophy," The Saturday Evening Post, 1903, George Horace Lorimer, editor
Before men ever wrote in clay they cast their words in verse and line, rhythmbound in poets' minds, defying time and age. ~David J. Beard (1947–2016), @Raqhun, tweet, 2009
Certainly he had a little property — which is a comfortable thing for anybody in the poetical line of business... ~F. W. Robinson, A Bridge of Glass, 1872
He paid his rent by printing things his cruel landlord wrote;
They were poems that couldn't be digested by a goat.
~"Are You a Country Publisher?," Ad Sense, April 1905
The nostalgic point is that this recalls the vanished days when there was a market for poetry and, while the stuff didn't pay well by any standards, still it was possible for an ink-stained wretch to make a couple of hundred dollars a year. And in those days, when summer jobs were scarce, that often made it possible for me to take the summer off and engage in nothing more strenuous than writing more poetry. ~Gerald Raftery (1905–1986), "The poetry in my past," If I May Say So, The Bennington Banner, 1974 November 4th
Poetry: Abandoned
In the eyes of those who anxiously seek perfection, a work is never truly completed — a word that for them has no sense — but abandoned... ~Paul Valéry, "Au Sujet du Cimetière Marin," 1933 [About his poem "The Cemetery by the Sea." Translated from French. Credit and further information: Ralph Keyes, The Quote Verifier, 2006.
On revisions as a matter of principle, I agree with Valery: 'A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.' ~W. H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957, Foreword, 1966
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. ~Paul Valéry, as paraphrased even further by W. H. Auden, in A Certain World: A Commonplace Book, 1970
"Most poems are never finished," (I was defensive). He sighed: "No, most poems are never started." ~Dr. SunWolf, tweet, 2011, professorsunwolf.com
Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare. I used to sit for hours reading the historical plays, generally in an old window in the thick walls of the school. I have also said that formerly pictures and scenery gave me considerable, and music very great delight. A grand symphony or overture of Mozart's or Beethoven's, with their full harmonies, could send shivers down my backbone. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me... On the other hand, novels, which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists...
My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.... if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept alive through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. ~Charles Darwin, 1876 [modified
What Is a Poet?
A poet is a reporter, interviewing his own heart. ~Christopher Morley
A poet is one whose soul hears. ~James H. Ecob
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. The love of language is either itself a poetic gift or a symptom of it. ~W. H. Auden
A poet is one who sees both the drama and the comedy. ~Jules Renard, journal, 1895
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times. ~Randall Jarrell
A poet trains himself to stand out in a storm and be struck by lightning. If he is lucky enough to be struck six times, he becomes immortal. Randall Jarrell said it, and he's right. ~James Dickey
The fair poetess is a perfect little tempest when aroused, which is never without fair cause. An eye-witness of one of her late justifiable storms, said to me that she felt as if she wanted a lightning rod about her person at the time. ~W. J. B., "Ella Wheeler Wilcox," 1887
To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession. He requires whatever it needs to be completely his own master. ~Robert Graves, Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art, 1946
The poet is a believer. In what? In everything. ~Jean Cocteau
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry," 1821
Great Poets discover themselves. Little Poets have to be "discovered" by somebody else. ~Marie Corelli (Mary Mills Mackay)
the poet is a sensitive snail —
wandering along the path of life
leaving a glittering trail of words
~Terri Guillemets, terriguillemets.com
All genuine poets are fervid politicians... Are there no politics in Hamlet? Is not Macbeth, is not the drama of Wallenstein, a sublime political treatise? Napoleon was a great poet, when, pointing to the pyramids, he said to his army, 'Forty centuries look down upon us!'... All true and lasting poetry is rooted in the business of life. ~Ebenezer Elliott (1781–1849), Preface, Corn Law Rhymes, 1831
I once used for the poet a detective's advertisement: 'Sees everyone, hears everyone, nobody suspects it.' ~Jean Cocteau
Rhyme-slinger. — A poet. ~Slang and its Analogues: A Dictionary of Heterodox Speech, John S. Farmer and W. E. Henley, 1890s
Poetry: Nature & Seasons
Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of Nature. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
The secrets of Nature's beauty, as well as of her philosophy, must be interpreted, and poets are God's interpreters to make these secrets plain. ~J. M'Dermaid, "Burns as a Poet," 1859
And the poet out-argues Nature. ~Christopher Morley
The little poet is a tiny stream
Winding, perhaps unnoticed, through the wold,
But catching here and there a flashing gleam
Of sunlight gold...
~Charles Buxton Going, "The Poets," Summer-fallow, 1892
[N]ature-loving poets.... the children of the sunlight, the minstrels of the groves and the companions of the moors. ~W.H. Gresswell, "A Poet's Corner," 1889
The gaze of nature, when thus awakened, dreams and pulls the poet after its dream. Words, too, can have an aura of their own. ~Walter Benjamin
To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie –
True Poems flee –
~Emily Dickinson, c.1879
In many cases these verses will seem to the reader like poetry torn up by the roots, with rain and dew and earth still clinging to them, giving a freshness and a fragrance not otherwise to be conveyed. ~Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Preface to Poems by Emily Dickinson, Edited by Two of Her Friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson
The poetry of earth is never dead...
The poetry of earth is ceasing, never...
~John Keats, "On the Grasshopper and Cricket," 1816
Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower. ~Carl Sandburg
The Poet gathers fruit from every tree,
Yea, grapes from thorns and figs from thistles he.
Pluck'd by his hand, the basest weed that grows
Towers to a lily, reddens to a rose.
~William Watson, Epigrams of Art, Life, and Nature, 1884
There are verses which, by their character, seem to belong to the mineral kingdom: they have ductility and lustre; others to the vegetable kingdom: they have sap; others, finally, to the animated kingdom: and they have life. The most beautiful are those that have soul; they belong to the three kingdoms, but to the Muse still more. ~Joseph Joubert, translated by George H. Calvert
Look! over yonder
what a beautiful
field of wildpoems
~Terri Guillemets, "Posy," 1992
To thee
Come I, a poet, hereward haply blown,
From out another worldflower lately flown.
Wilt ask, What profit e'er a poet brings?
He beareth starry stuff about his wings...
~Sidney Lanier, "The Bee," 1877
Nathless I'll drive me to thy deepest sweet,
Yea, richlier shall that pain the pollen beat
From me to thee, for oft these pollens be
Fine dust from wars that poets wage for thee.
But, O beloved Earthbloom soft a-shine
Upon the universal Jessamine...
Yield, yield the heartsome honey love to me
Hid in thy nectary!
~Sidney Lanier, "The Bee," 1877
No poet spent with visions,
Bit by the City's teeth,
Laughing at fortune, seeking
Fame and the singer's wreath,
But must grow brave this evening,
Humming a wilder tune,
Armed against men and nations.
Why? He beholds the moon!
~Vachel Lindsay, "The Moon is a Mirror: What the Young Rhymer Said," 1913
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
~Archibald MacLeish
Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it. ~Carl Sandburg
I am no dealer in metaphysics, and will not attempt to define poetry by its rules. Poetry lies hid within the inner core of man's thoughts and feelings and affections. It pervades the glorious universe in which the Almighty has placed him. It shines forth from the starry heavens, and from the deep blue vault of the summer sky. It lurks amid the green leaves of the groves, and gushes forth in the "wood notes wild" of their sweet songsters. It sparkles and plays in the flickering eddies of the stream... ~J. M'Dermaid, "Burns as a Poet," 1859
A poet is the mocking-bird of the spiritual universe. In him are collected all the individual songs of all individual natures. ~Sidney Lanier, c.1858
It might almost be said that the birds are all birds of the poets and of no one else, because it is only the poetical temperament that fully responds to them. All the great ornithologists have been poets in deed if not in word. The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet — so vehement and intense in his life, large brained, large lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song — the beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds. Indeed, is not the bird the original type and teacher of the poet? Keats and Shelley, perhaps, most notably, have the bird-organization and the piercing wild-bird cry — the sharp semi-tones of the sparrows and larks. The oldest poets, the antique bards, make little mention of songbirds but loved better the soaring, swooping birds of prey, the eagle, the ominous birds, the vultures, the clamorous sea-birds and screaming hawks. These suited better the rugged, warlike character of the times. Homer must've heard the twittering of swallows and the warble of nightingales; but they were not adequate symbols to express what he felt or to adorn his theme. It is not because the old bards were less as poets, but that they were more as men. ~John Burroughs, "Birds and Poets," 1873 [modified
Poetry: Music
Poetry is the music of the soul; and, above all, of great and feeling souls. ~Voltaire
Rhyme is the music of the poetic dance. ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Sparks from the Philosopher's Stone, 1882
Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music. ~Ezra Pound, A B C of Reading, 1960
My poetry, I should think, has become the way of my giving out what music is within me. ~Countee Cullen
The world is full of Poetry—the air
Is living with its spirit; and the waves
Dance to the music of its melodies,
And sparkle in its brightness. Earth is veiled,
And mantled with its beauty; and the walls,
That close the universe, with crystal, in,
Are eloquent with voices, that proclaim
The unseen glories of immensity...
~James G. Percival, "Poetry," c.1822
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley
The poet smote his harp, whose cords were spun
Of threads of rain and golden webs of sun
By summer winds entwined, and pitched to key
With bass of ocean's deep-voiced harmony...
~Charles Buxton Going, "Completed," Star-Glow & Song, 1909
A poem compresses much in a tight space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. ~E. B. White
If a choice had to be made between clarity and rhythmical design, clarity was sacrificed. Must the word-order be violated to gain a freer rhythm? Let it be violated. Codas, double and triple, were added to sonnets to make them "hang"; burden lines were tucked between cadences already queer, to obtain the choric effect so precious to the classic pulse. Almost no other poet has been so rigorous in preserving the purely aesthetic elements of rhythm. Hence the conventional ear, beating like a music-teacher's metronome, is fated to be shocked by the "licenses" invoked by this original metrist. But if Hopkins's verse is read aloud, with plenty of breath — as he always wished it to be read — it persistently lands on its own feet and runs off on its own excellent legs. ~Henry Morton Robinson, "Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Preface," 1927
The Wreck of the Deutschland contains everything that is significant in Gerard Hopkins's poetry: memorable grand lines rolling off the edge of iron cliffs into roaring seas of music, whole stanzas that sweep along in a narrative gale, others that run flush with The Hound of Heaven. ~Henry Morton Robinson, "Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Preface," 1927
...to create a perpetual feeling of enchantment by the constant but unobtrusive employment of the most beautiful and melodious words... a painter and musician in speech... ~Richard Garnett, April 1897, Introduction to The Poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Inner thought: it is easier to make rhymes on a train; the lines come out the right length because the wheel clicks never miss their count. Idea: if we were a poet we would spend all our time on trains. ~E. B. White
Liars & Lyres: A Poet's Music & Truth
Lyres are placid in the hands of poets; but the true lyre is the poet himself. ~Alexandre Vinet
The poet has a truth of his own which people take for a lie. ~Jean Cocteau
...the poetic soul... a living lyre, it only lives enough to echo, and all that it has of life it pours out, and spends in song: the inspiring tripod which the poet ascends, at once unites him to, and separates him from, society. ~Alexandre Vinet
"The Poet"
To what good, to what avail did fate desire
that I be made a poet, though I be weak?
Vain are my words; the sounds of my lyre
are not true, even those most sweet...
"The Muse"
You are no liar, poet. The world you see
is the true one. Only your lyre's chords
recognize what's true, and only they
toward that life will be your trusty guides...
~C. P. Cavafy (Greek poet, 1863–1933), "The Poet and the Muse," translated by Daniel Mendelsohn, 2009
Poets touch forcibly and truly that invisible lyre which echoes in unison in all human souls. ~Alexandre Vinet
The poet is a liar
Who lies with truth,
'gainst folly, sin and ire,
To hold and soothe.
The poet is a child
That plays with life
Till he becomes all wild
From love's sad strife.
He loves all that is man,
He loves the moon
That turns the darkling span
Of night to noon.
With words serene and clear,
With trembling voice,
He sings to the deaf ear
Till stones rejoice.
~Jen Tai, "the poet is a liar," 1955
...the poet is a liar, but a liar in a good cause... ~Roy Pascal, 1968
But she remembers thee as one
Long loved, and for a season gone;
For thee her poet's lyre is wreathed,
Her marble wrought, her music breathed...
~Fitz Greene Halleck, "Marco Bozzaris"
It has even come to be said, in vulgar joke, that poets are apt to play the liar (lyre). But even when the term was synonymous with fable and romance — poetry, with inherent dignity, yet advanced her claims, and from the entire world received homage and worship. ~"On the Esoteric Meaning of Homer's Odyssey," 1860
Why hurl reproof and not applause,
Why on the poet's lyre make wars,
And seek to hush his tuneful string
By criticism's poisoned sting?
Sing on, ye poets, spite of faults,
The world will stop when music halts,
For harmony makes all things strong,
Stars in their courses poet's song.
~Pattie French Witherspoon (1868–1934), "To the Silent Lyre"
Poetry: Philosophy
It seems as though poetry and philosophy were twin stars of different but harmonious colours, each shining in the other's light, and shedding a twofold radiance upon their attendant planets. ~Henry James Slack (1818–1896), The Ministry of the Beautiful, 1850
What is poetry but impassioned truth — philosophy in its essence — the spirit of that bright consummate flower, whose root is in our bosoms? ~Ebenezer Elliott (1781–1849), Preface to Corn Law Rhymes, 1831
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. ~S. T. Coleridge (1772–1834), Biographia Literaria, 1817
If you would be a poet,
These words will save you strife:
The one, sole thing you need is
A philosophy of life!
~John Gould Fletcher, "Present-Day Poetry"
Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
Poets have a hundred times more good sense than philosophers. In seeking the beautiful, they find more truths than philosophers do in seeking the true. ~Joseph Joubert, translated by George H. Calvert
What is poetry but impassioned truth — philosophy in its essence — the spirit of that bright consummate flower, whose root is in our bosoms? ~Ebenezer Elliott
The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse — you might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history; it consists really in this, that 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, translated by Ingram Bywater, 1920
[I]n every part of this eastern world, from Pekin to Damascus, the popular teachers of moral wisdom have immemorially been poets... ~William Jones, "On the Philosophy of the Asiaticks," eleventh anniversary discourse, delivered 1794 February 20th
Without philosophy there can be no true poetry: without it pretty verses may, indeed, be made; but in order to be really a poet it is essential to be also, up to a certain point, a philosopher. ~Alexandre Vinet
The truth is, we are for the most part indifferent to life as a whole, and live within a small section of it so absorbedly that we have no interest in relating this to life in general... We string our days together on a thread of money-making or ambition or amusement or love, or mere avoidance of starvation. But this is the only unity we seek in life, and we make little effort to see if there is any connection between our own experience and the experience of the human race. We are content to be rich men or lovers or nobodies without looking at ourselves as figures in the eternal procession of rich men and lovers and nobodies. That is why there are so few poets and philosophers. The poet and the philosopher are those who are aware that there is a procession in things, and who are always looking for the connection between one thing and another. They may find the wrong meaning in life, but they are not content till they have found some meaning, even if it is only that it means nothing. ~Robert Lynd, "The Old Game," Solomon in All His Glory, 1923
Every great poem is in itself limited by necessity, — but in its suggestions unlimited and infinite. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), "Drift Wood, A Collection of Essays: Table-Talk," Prose Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1857
Poetry: Human
The poet who knows one human can portray a hundred. ~Marie Dubsky, Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916), translated by Mrs Annis Lee Wister, 1882
There is no vagrant notion in your nature that poetry does not encourage. ~E. W. Howe
Re Ezra Pound — poetry happens to be an art ;and artists happen to be human beings. ~E.E. Cummings, 1945
Perhaps beneath the scoundrel that I am, there lies a misled poet? Perhaps a mystifier who enjoys mystifying himself? ~Octave Mirbeau, "The Mission," The Torture Garden, 1899, translated from the French by Alvah C. Bessie, 1931
The universe is one stupendous poem
Whereof the suns and stars are words and letters,
And we frail humans, punctuation marks.
~Adolf Wolff (1883–1944), "Immortality," Songs, Sighs and Curses, 1913
We may conceive, and we even know by experience, another kind of poetry... a poetry whose accents, properly speaking, are not those of one man, but of the human race; which tells not what an individual has felt, but what has been felt by the human being ever since the fall that destroyed the simplicity of his nature, and perhaps, by that very fact, created all that is poetry...
When Innocence retreated tearfully from our earth, she met Poetry on the threshold; they passed close by, looked at each other, and each went her way,—the one to heaven, the other to the dwellings of men. ~Alexandre Vinet
This spirit is the breath of Nature, blown
Over the sleeping forms of clay, who else
Doze on through life in blank stupidity...
~James G. Percival, "Poetry," c.1822
Education... is the process by which we gradually discover both the real nature of the human life about us, and our own relation to the whole of it. The process is never complete. Even poets and great men are in the dark about their own function; but they are less in the dark than the rest of us. They speak from a knowledge that is greater than ours. They have a wonderful power over us; for they help us in our struggle to see the world as it is. ~John Jay Chapman, Practical Agitation, 1900
Let others sing of wondrous whirling worlds,
Of Suns innumerable, the Milky Way's extent,
The depths of nebulae or of that veil
Thrice terrible that hides the face of God.
Mine be the song of joys and woes of men.
The humble scribe am I who chronicles
The heart-beats love provokes; the hopes —
The moments of despair, the aspirations —
The struggles, triumphs, disillusions
Of Mankind — of myself.
These are the themes my song is built upon,
I write the history of the Soul of Man.
~Adolf Wolff (1883–1944), "Prelude," Songs of Rebellion, Songs of Life, Songs of Love, 1914
Poets are candid. They tell us not under an abstract, but an individual form, in which reality breathes, what humanity thinks in the most secret recesses of its mind. ~Alexandre Vinet
Poetry: Art & Painting
A poet is a painter of the soul... ~Isaac D'Israeli
Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
What better can the poets do
With sunsets? ponder every line
And write a labored verse or two,
Beflowered with 'gorgeous,' 'grand,' 'divine'?
~Hannah R. Hudson, "Word-Painting," Poems, 1874 [alternatively published as "Poet and Painter"
Prose is a photograph, poetry a painting in oil-colors. ~Austin O'Malley
By poetry we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colours. ~Thomas Babington Macaulay
Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death. ~Carl Sandburg
If Painting be Poetry's sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dragoons with drawn sabres and white-plumed helmets. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
Poetry: Flowers
A good poem, like a bouquet of choice flowers, is the blending of exquisite coloring and sweet perfume, to the delight of both head and heart. ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), "Pulpit, Pen, and Platform," Sparks from the Philosopher's Stone, 1882
There is as much difference between good poetry and fine verses, as between the smell of a flower-garden and of a perfumer's shop. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
Being perfect artists and ingenuous poets, the Chinese have piously preserved the love and holy cult of flowers; one of the very rare and most ancient traditions which has survived their decadence. And since flowers had to be distinguished from each other, they have attributed graceful analogies to them, dreamy images, pure and passionate names which perpetuate and harmonize in our minds the sensations of gentle charm and violent intoxication with which they inspire us. So it is that certain peonies, their favorite flower, are saluted by the Chinese, according to their form or color, by these delicious names, each an entire poem and an entire novel: The Young Girl Who Offers Her Breasts, or: The Water That Sleeps Beneath the Moon, or: The Sunlight in the Forest, or: The First Desire of the Reclining Virgin, or: My Gown Is No Longer All White Because in Tearing It the Son of Heaven Left a Little Rosy Stain; or, even better, this one: I Possessed My Lover in the Garden. ~Octave Mirbeau, The Torture Garden, 1899, translated from the French by Alvah C. Bessie, 1931
We should manage our Thoughts in composing a Poem, as Shepherds do their Flowers in making a Garland; first select the choicest, and then dispose them in the most proper Places, where they give a Lustre to each other... ~Alexander Pope, "Thoughts on Various Subjects," 1727
Poetry: Blood, Veins, Heart, Sweat, Tears, Pain & Suffering
Have faith in poets, for they have not been ashamed to tell you that men suffer. They have not been afraid to look life in the face: and often the encounter is more comforting than you had expected. ~Christopher Morley
A vein of Poetry exists in the hearts of all men; no man is made altogether of Poetry. We are all poets when we read a poem as well. ~Thomas Carlyle, "The Hero as Poet," lecture, 1840
Many years ago, at a time when I was obsessed by Rilke's poetry, I happened to cut myself shaving, and (looking in the mirror) I thought: "If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry." ~Stephen Spender, "Bleeding Poetry," The New York Review of Books, 1983
With the return of cheerfulness I feel a sense of loss. The poems no longer flow out... I have worked all week on a sonnet — hundreds of drafts — but it will not come out. Perhaps I have overworked it and killed it. ~May Sarton, 1970
Poetry should be vital — either stirring our blood by its divine movement, or snatching our breath by its divine perfection. ~Augustine Birrell, "On the Alleged Obscurity of Mr. Browning's Poetry," Obiter Dicta
Poetry such as this, that comes up from the hidden blood, from a stung soul and stinging flesh... ~Hildegarde Flanner, "The Poetry of Gerard Hopkins," in The Double Dealer, 1924
Poetry is the sister of Sorrow. Every man that suffers and weeps is a poet; every tear is a verse, and every heart a poem. ~Marc André, quoted in A Thousand Flashes of French Wit, Wisdom, and Wickedness, collected and translated by J. De Finod, 1880
Perhaps sorrow is something which is inseparable from the poet, but when I listened to that lark singing, I felt not the slightest trace of pain or sadness... ~Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), Kusamakura, 1906, translated from the Japanese by Alan Turney, The Three Cornered World, 1965
The poet is a man of words. Words are his breath and his life. In them, and in them alone, is ease for his suffering and sublimation for his personal and vicarious pains. ~Dorothy Thompson, "Death of a Poet," 1939
Even if it seems pleasant, a poet's life is ghastly, it takes place among tortures and he cannot avoid a single one of them. ~Jean Cocteau
Poetry holds the dramatic shadow, the secret, of the heart's desire. ~Arthur Davison Ficke, "The Nature of Poetry," 1926
There is a chord of poetry, I do believe, in all men; petrified and frozen up, it may be in too many, by the cold realities of this work-a-day world; yet, at times, that "touch of nature which makes the whole world kin," shoots like the electric spark through their veins, and thaws and softens the hard and care-worn heart.
...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. ~Paul Engle, "Poetry Is Ordinary Language Raised to the Nth Power," The New York Times, 1957
The poetry of the heart is always worth something... ~Charles Knight (1791-1873), "My First Grief"
Emily Dickinson's poetry is life — blood — spirit. Her passion fills all the poems, till they are like alabaster filled with flame. ~E. Merrill Root, 1924
In her early thirties verses began to fall, dewdrops and blood-drops, upon her hidden paths — flakes of rose and flakes of fire... Her darting lines sting imagination like the barbs of her own bees. ~Katharine Lee Bates, "A House of Rose," 1925 [of Emily Dickinson
Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue! ~Jean Cocteau, The Blood of a Poet, translated from the French by Carol Martin-Sperry
Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some direct social utility.... to give an immediate compensation for the pains of turning blood into ink.... Poetry begins... with a savage beating a drum in a jungle... hyperbolically one might say that the poet is older than other human beings.... 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... ~T. S. Eliot, "The Use of Poetry," 1932
Truth is enough for prose:
Calmly it goes
To tell just what it knows.
For verse, skill will suffice—
Delicate, nice
Casting of verbal dice.
Poetry, men attain
By subtler pain
More flagrant in the brain—
An honesty unfeigned,
A heart unchained,
A madness well restrained.
~Christopher Morley, "At the Mermaid Cafeteria"
Writing, especially writing poetry, is like perspiring. The poem, or book, is a kind of sweat. It would be unhealthy to walk, or run, or play games, or practise athletics without sweating. ~Jean Cocteau
The lamp you lighted in the olden time
Will show you my heart's-blood beating through the rhyme:
A poet's journal, writ in fire and tears...
Then slow deliverance, with the gaps of years...
~Bayard Taylor, "First Evening," The Poet's Journal, 1862
Within my heart there glows
A gay white light—
Lovely as some bright rose.
Through struggle storm and sorrow
This light is mine
Illumining all tomorrow.
Life would be naught to me
Without my light,
The flame of poetry.
~George Elliston, "Poetry," Changing Moods, 1922
Mencken once called poetry "pretty little bellyaches." The statement could only have come from a man who had never known real stomach trouble, the kind that produces The Divine Comedy. ~Clifton Fadiman, "American Light Verse, Once Over Lightly," Enter, Conversing, 1962
Rejected by Hell, the exiled poet will try in vain to reinstate himself there, to be reinvigorated by his sufferings. ~E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, 1956, translated from the French by Richard Howard [a little altered
Sometimes the poet writes with fire; with blood
Sometimes; sometimes with blackest ink:
It matters not. God finds his mighty way
Into his verse...
~J. G. Holland, Kathrina: A Poem, "Part II: Love," 1867
I bleed words,
Ink drops, and
Poetry merges—
Blackish-crimson
Autobiography
~Terri Guillemets, terriguillemets.com
Now to form the complete poet, neither heart only, nor head only, is sufficient: the complete poet must have a heart in his brain, or a brain in his heart. Such was Shakspeare, complete because he had both, and supreme because he had both to the highest degree. ~George Darley
There can be poetry in the writings of few men; but it ought to be in the hearts and lives of all. ~John Sterling
If it touches the heart of a Poet,
The gods and the ages will know it...
~Edwin Markham, "The Song Mystery," The Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems, 1913
True poets are those who have received from God, together with the gift of expression, the power of penetrating further than others into the things of the heart and the life. ~Alexandre Vinet
The poet pursues the trouble in your heart as pitilessly as he has ferreted out his own. ~Christopher Morley
Being a poet, he was afflicted — with nerves and with imagination. The poet's nerves are a sort of radio sending and receiving station; they quiver to waves which leave the stolid undisturbed. It is the joy and the agony of the poet to feel more than what happens to himself; to feel and respond to what happens to people he has never met, never seen, far away, nothing too far away. It is the curse of his imagination to see — to see, though staring at a blank wall. ~Dorothy Thompson, "Death of a Poet," 1939 [Ernst Toller
"I have often wondered if poets feel what they write — whether Swinburne, for instance, ever felt the weight of a dead cold thing within him here," slightly touching the region of his heart, "and realized that he had to drag that corpse of unburied love with him everywhere — even to the grave, and beyond — O God! — beyond the grave!" ~Marie Corelli, A Romance of Two Worlds, "Chapter IX: An Electric Shock," 1886
The poet performs the greatest of social functions: he elucidates the secrets of other hearts by eavesdropping at his own. At the bottom of almost every heart is terror. But it comforts men to know that others are also afraid. It is because we hardly know what we ourselves think that we are endlessly eager to know the thoughts of others. The poets discover us to ourselves; and they speak not apprehensively, not embarrassed, not beshrewed and distracted by a muddle of affairs, but in that perfection and power and happiness that comes of impassioned solitude. By making us share their sufferings they have eased themselves and eased us, too. ~Christopher Morley
The true power of the poet is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them. ~Dennis Gabor, "Poet," c.1969
Poetry mends a broken arrow then shoots us in the heart with it. ~Terri Guillemets
The flowery Path of Poetry but ill accords with the thorny Mazes of the Law; in the one I have wandered with rapture from Infancy, and I have endeavoured to grace the other with a simple but lasting Ornament — Integrity of Heart. ~Charles Snart, "Dedication, to Robert Lowe, Esq. Oxton," 1807 January 1st, Newark, Selection of Poems
Pleasant images in pleasant words...
of hope, and love, and melody,
the gushings of an overburdened heart...
~James Gates Percival (1795–1856), "Love of Study," c.1822 [a little altered
...it is not health, it is convalescence that is poetical. Just as certain plants only yield all their fragrance to the fingers that crush them, so it is only in a state of suffering that certain affections utter all their poetry. ~Alexandre Vinet
There is a pleasure in poetic pains,
Which only poets know...
~William Cowper, "The Time-Piece"
"That's the way of poets," said Warrington. "They fall in love, jilt, or are jilted; they suffer, and they cry out that they suffer more than any other mortals: and when they have experienced feelings enough, they note them down in a book, and take the book to market. All poets are humbugs, all literary men are humbugs; directly a man begins to sell his feelings for money he's a humbug. If a poet gets a pain in his side from too good a dinner, he bellows Ai, Ai, louder than Prometheus." ~William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis, 1850
What is a poet? A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... And men crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again"; that is as much as to say: "May new sufferings torment your soul, but may your lips be formed as before; for the cries would only frighten us, but the music is delicious." ~Søren Kierkegaard, translated by David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson, 1944
If a poet is very great, the blows of conflict and violence temper him into a blade sharp enough to cut through all confusion. If he is very great, he becomes judgment when all judgment is suspended. ~Dorothy Thompson, "Death of a Poet," 1939 [a little altered
You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. ~John Ciardi, 1962
her head was cracked —
not tragically, just poetically
it's how the poems got in —
and out
~Terri Guillemets, terriguillemets.com
Here he had read to me his tear-stained page
Of sorrow... here would try
To lay his burden in the hands of Song,
And make the Poet bear the Lover's wrong,
But still his heart impatiently would cry:
"In vain, in vain! You cannot teach to flow
In measured lines so measureless a woe.
First learn to slay this wild beast of despair,
Then from his harmless jaws your honey tear!"
~Bayard Taylor, "First Evening"
Emily: Most people quote love poems.
Ben: Nah, I prefer a dirge. It's like a different kind of love poem.
~Dickinson, "A brief, but patient illness," 2019, written by Rachel Axler and Alena Smith
Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would rightly appal them if it did. ~Christopher Morley, 1930
There's so much prose in life that now and then,
A tender song of pity stirs the heart,
A simple lay of love from fevered pen,
Makes in some soul the unshed tear-drops start.
Sing, poets! sing for aye your sweetest strain,
For life without its poetry were vain!
~S. J. Adair Fitz-Gerald (1859–1925), The Zankiwank & The Bletherwitch, 1896
Poetry: Witty & Mocking
I had rather be a kitten and cry mew
Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers;
I had rather hear a brazen canstick turn'd,
Or a dry wheel grate on the axle-tree;
And that would set my teeth nothing on edge,
Nothing so much as mincing poetry...
~William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, c.1597 [III, 1, Hotspur of the North]
I hate French poetry. What measured glitter! ~Israel Zangwill, Dreamers of the Ghetto, "From a Mattress Grave," 1897, spoken by the character Heinrich Heine
'There is correct English: that is not slang.'
'I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.'
...'Aha, Miss Rosy, you don't know Homer from slang. I shall invent a new game; I shall write bits of slang and poetry on slips, and give them to you to separate.'
'Dear me, how amusing it is to hear young people talk!' said Mrs Vincy, with cheerful admiration. ~George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, Volume I, Book I—Miss Brooke, 1871
Where is Richard? I owe him an apology. He was talking away beautifully, giving me all sorts of little thrills with his absurd poetical views, and I only closed my eyes so that I could hear better — I did take a teeny nap, but don't ever tell the dear boy... ~Hughes Mearns, Richard Richard, 1916
Then a health to the poets I'll toss,
To Byron and Shelley and Keats,
To Dobson the blithe and Swinburne the lithe,
And the Irish phenomenon Yeats.
~Your Health!, compiled by Idelle Phelps, 1906
Byron and Shelley and Keats
Were a trio of lyrical treats.
The forehead of Shelley was cluttered with curls,
And Keats never was a descendant of earls,
And Byron walked out with a number of girls,
But it didn't impair the poetical feats
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley and Keats.
~Dorothy Parker, "A Pig's-Eye View of Literature: The Lives and Times of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and George Gordon, Lord Byron," 1927
...poetry, which stuff never did make good sense to me, besides the trouble it puts you to by having to start every line with a fresh capital. ~Kate Trimble Sharber (b.1883), The Annals of Ann, 1910
Poets aren't very useful,
Because they aren't very consumeful or very produceful...
~Ogden Nash (1902–1971), "Everybody Makes Poets"
And let me be rather but honest with no-wit,
Than a noisy nonsensical half-witted poet.
~"The Poet's Prayer," c.1734
Hey, Walter, what do you think of that for poetry! It's enough to make old Ralph Waldo Longfellow turn over with envy. ~Hughes Mearns, Richard Richard, 1916
Susan was not acquainted with Kipling's poem on the folly of giving your heart to a dog to tear; but if she had been she would, in spite of her contempt for poetry, have thought that for once a poet had uttered sense. ~L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Ingleside, 1939 ["Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware / Of giving your heart to a dog to tear." ~Rudyard Kipling, "The Power of the Dog"
Salts of lemon never fails to remove ink spots. A great many would-be poets should buy the salts by the barrel and pickle their effusions in it. ~Mary Wilson Little, Reveries of a Paragrapher, 1897
Rhyme.— Often a substitute for poetry... ~"Specimens of a Patent Pocket Dictionary, For the use of those who wish to understand the meaning of things as well as words," The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, 1824‑5
Poetry: Subtlety
A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. ~E. B. White, 1939
The liberties a poet sings
Are shadows, not substantial things...
~Thomas McGrath, "Just Above the Battle, Mother— (The Death Song of Professor Francis Doubt)," The Movie at the End of the World: Collected Poems, 1972
You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick, and say to yourself, when the works are laid out before you, the vowels, the consonants, the rhymes or rhythms, 'Yes, this is it. This is why the poem moves me so...' But you're back again where you began. You've back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in. ~Dylan Thomas
Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for. ~Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes. ~Carl Sandburg
The truth is, the laws of heredity are yet "wropt in mistry." Heredity is in too early a stage to be taken up by the artist other than romantically. The idea that the novelist should occupy himself with a definite scientific problem opens up comical vistas. For example: A man with the gout marries a woman with a soul. Show that the second child will suffer from chorea, and the fifth from a tendency to minor poetry. ~Israel Zangwill, 1893
Poetry is an echo asking a shadow dancer to be a partner. ~Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing. ~Edmund Burke
Poetry: Commonplace & Primitive
In poetry and in eloquence the beautiful and grand must spring from the commonplace... All that remains for us is to be new while repeating the old, and to be ourselves in becoming the echo of the whole world. ~Alexandre Vinet
There is a sparkling vein of poetry in many a person that the ordinary penetration of friends and relatives fails to discover. ~Thomas Clark Henley, A Handful of Paper Shavings, 1861
Poets have forgotten that the first lesson of literature, no less than of life, is the learning how to burn your own smoke; that the way to be original is to be healthy; that the fresh color, so delightful in all good writing, is won by escaping from the fixed air of self into the brisk atmosphere of universal sentiments; and that to make the common marvellous, as if it were a revelation, is the test of genius. ~James Russell Lowell, "Chaucer," 1870
The sublimity of poetry, you see, lies in the fact that it does not take an educated person to understand it and to love it. On the contrary. The educated do not understand it, and generally they despise it, because they have too much pride. To love poetry it is enough to have a soul,—a little soul, naked, like a flower. Poets speak to the souls of the simple, of the sad, of the sick. And that is why they are eternal. Do you know that, when one has sensibility, one is always something of a poet? ~Octave Mirbeau, A Chambermaid's Diary / Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre, 1900, translated from the French by Benjamin R. Tucker
Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts. It is not necessarily a moralizer; it does not necessarily improve one's character; it does not even teach good manners. It is a beautiful work of nature, like an eagle or a high sunrise. You owe it no duty. If you like it, listen to it; if not, let it alone. ~Robinson Jeffers, 1948
Can [poets] do anything but gradually ascend towards the source, towards the primitive ideas that bind together man—the family and society—with a different cement to that of science and of law? Long will it be ere poetry can solder together the fragments of its falling sceptre; but these fragments are beautiful, and in the present day he who succeeds in picking up one of them will be a king among us. ~Alexandre Vinet
Poetry: Night & Sleep
Great poetry is... a voice in the night. ~Arthur Davison Ficke, "The Present State of Poetry," 1911
Poetry is like an unexpected noise in the night: the creak of a door, the footstep on the porch, the soft scuffle of a moth against the screen, which rouses every sense to an instant alert. So comes poetry to the drowsy mind, which startles a moment, wonders, and returns to sleep. ~Christopher Morley
An Everlasting Poem is the Night,
Gleaming incessant on the page of space:
Printing itself in letters all of gold:
Singing itself in measures, all of fire...
~George Gilfillan, "The Poets of Night," Night: A Poem, 1867
I often think that poets never have sung
Beauty but with a dull and stammering tongue:
That only in dim wonderlands of sleep
To which the key is lost, in drowsing deep,
Is art transformed from out a broken cry
To an immortal, effortless ecstasy.
~John Gould Fletcher, "Dream-Poetry"
Mirrors seemed to have taken up a hell of a lot of time in his life. He thought of one now—the mirror in the bathroom, years ago, back home. When he was a kid—fourteen, fifteen—writing a poem every night before he went to sleep, starting and finishing it at one sitting even though it might be two or three o'clock, that bathroom mirror had come to mean more to him than his own bed. Nights when he had finished a poem, what could have been more natural, more necessary and urgent, than to go and look at himself to see if he had changed? Here at this desk, this night, one of life's important moments had occurred. Humbly, almost unaware, certainly innocent, he had sat there and been the instrument by which a poem was transmitted to paper. ~Charles R. Jackson, The Lost Weekend, 1944
The night of Shakspere is a southern night,
With tipsy stars for candles burning out,
With elves and fairies footing it to song...
With lovers sitting on the moonlight banks...
With glowworms burning gaily 'mid their woods,
With thrilling song of nightingale and lute...
And thus is Shakspere's world a soft strong link,
Like some serene and isthmus seeming star,
Binding us to the galaxies of God...
~George Gilfillan, "The Poets of Night," Night: A Poem, 1867
Beautiful poems... are nothing else than the waking dreams of a sage. ~Joseph Joubert, translated by George H. Calvert
In the earlier years of his literary career he would frequently awake at night, get out of bed, light a candle, and compose many lines upon some poem which he said had "forced itself upon his mind." ~William H. Hayne, "Paul H. Hayne's Methods of Composition," c.1892 [a little altered
Hail candle-light! without disparagement to sun or moon, the kindliest luminary of the three... We love to read, talk, sit silent, eat, drink, sleep, by
Poetry: Math & Science
Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know. ~Joseph Roux, translated by Isabel F. Hapgood
The fancy and imagination act, also, in a twofold manner. Sometimes they create with a simple reference to the sentiment or feeling which they would embody, and then their action is called Art. Sometimes they create with sole reference to reasoning or criticism upon their results, and this constitutes Science, of which Mathesis is a branch. Mathematics and Poetry are, therefore, the utterance of the same power of imagination, only that in the one case it is addressed to the head, in the other, to the heart. ~Thomas Hill, "The Imagination in Mathematics," 1857
Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smokestacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets. ~Carl Sandburg
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. ~Gustave Flaubert, 1853
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone. ~Thomas Hardy, 1896
"...This functionary, however, has been thoroughly mystified; and the remote source of his defeat lies in the supposition that the Minister is a fool, because he has acquired renown as a poet. All fools are poets; this the Prefect feels; and he is merely guilty of a non distributio medii in thence inferring that all poets are fools."
"But is this really the poet?" I asked. "There are two brothers, I know; and both have attained reputation in letters. The Minister I believe has written learnedly on the Differential Calculus. He is a mathematician, and no poet."
"You are mistaken; I know him well; he is both. As poet and mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all..." ~Edgar Allan Poe, "The Purloined Letter," 1844
Kaya no té wo
Hitotsu hazushité,
Tsuki-mi-kana!
This short poem is attributed to the famous poetess Chiyo. Having been challenged to make a poem of seventeen syllables referring to a square, a triangle, and a circle, she is said to have immediately responded with the above, translating to: "Detaching one corner of the mosquito-net, lo! I behold the moon!" ~Lafcadio Hearn, In Ghostly Japan, 1899
Short Poems: Haiku, Senryu, etc.
The haiku poets liked to see how much they could embrace in a precise small form; the aim being everything. ~Harry Behn (1898–1973), "On Haiku," Chrysalis: Concerning Children and Poetry, 1968
I like the fresh feeling I get from haiku, the directness and unclutteredness. ~Barry Fox Stevens (1902–1985), Don't Push the River (it flows by itself), 1970
All complaints about life today will be ignored unless they are submitted in the format of elegant haiku poetry. ~Dr. SunWolf, @wordwhispers, tweet, 2016, professorsunwolf.com
Poetry in Japan is universal as the air. It is felt by everybody. It is read by everybody. It is composed by almost everybody, — irrespective of class and condition. Nor is it thus ubiquitous in the mental atmosphere only: it is everywhere to be heard by the ear, and seen by the eye!...
The first curious fact is that, from very ancient times, the writing of short poems has been practised in Japan even more as a moral duty than as a mere literary art. The old ethical teaching was somewhat like this: — "Are you very angry? — do not say anything unkind, but compose a poem. Is your best-beloved dead? — do not yield to useless grief, but try to calm your mind by making a poem. Are you troubled because you are about to die, leaving so many things unfinished? — be brave, and write a poem on death! Whatever injustice or misfortune disturbs you, put aside your resentment or your sorrow as soon as possible, and write a few lines of sober and elegant verse for a moral exercise." ~Lafcadio Hearn, In Ghostly Japan, 1899
How, I wondered, could you regain a poetical frame of mind at times like this? I came to the conclusion that it could be done, if only you could take your feelings and place them in front of you, and then taking a pace back to give yourself the room to move that a bystander would have, examine them calmly and with complete honesty. The poet has an obligation to conduct a post-mortem on his own corpse and to make public his findings as to any disease he may encounter. There are many ways in which he may do this, but the best, and certainly the most convenient, is to try and compress every single incident which he comes across into the seventeen syllables of a Hokku...
Let us assume that you are angry: you write about what it is that has made you lose your temper, and immediately it seems that it is someone else's anger that you are considering. Nobody can be angry and write a Hokku at the same time. Likewise, if you are crying, express your tears in seventeen syllables and you feel happy. No sooner are your thoughts down on paper, than all connection between you and the pain which caused you to cry is severed, and your only feeling is one of happiness that you are a man capable of shedding tears. ~Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), Kusamakura, 1906, translated from the Japanese by Alan Turney, The Three Cornered World, 1965
By the use of a few chosen words the composer of a short poem endeavors to do exactly what the painter endeavors to do with a few strokes of the brush, — to evoke an image or a mood, — to revive a sensation or an emotion. And the accomplishment of this purpose, — by poet or by picture-maker, — depends altogether upon capacity to suggest, and only to suggest... So the term ittakkiri — meaning "all gone," or "entirely vanished," in the sense of "all told," — is contemptuously applied to verses in which the verse-maker has uttered his whole thought; — praise being reserved for compositions that leave in the mind the thrilling of a something unsaid. Like the single stroke of a temple-bell, the perfect short poem should set murmuring and undulating, in the mind of the hearer, many a ghostly aftertone of long duration. ~Lafcadio Hearn, In Ghostly Japan, 1899
Haiku is not a shriek, a howl, a sigh, or a yawn; rather, it is the deep breath of life. ~Taneda Santōka (1882–1940), translated by John Stevens, 1980
Poetry: Free Verse
"Them kind of poems ain’t stylish no longer. Rhymes has gone out. Everything’s ‘free verse’ now. I’ve been readin’ up about it. So I’ve wrote some of ’em. They’re real easy to do — jest lines chopped off free an’ easy, anywheres that it happens, only have some long, an’ some short, for notoriety, you know, like this." And she read:
"A great big cloud
That was black
Came up
Out of the West. An’ I knew
Then
For sure
That a storm was brewin’.
An’ it brewed."
"Now that was dead easy — anybody could see that. But it’s kind of pretty, I think, too, jest the same. Them denatured poems are always pretty, I think — about trees an’ grass an’ flowers an’ the sky, you know. Don’t you?" ~Eleanor H. Porter, "Free Verse — à la Susan," Dawn, 1918
Sorry if these lines are irregular in length and jolty in meter. ~J. F. Bowman, 1868 [a little altered
The best literary periods have always been those when authors weighed and counted their words. ~Joseph Joubert, translated by George H. Calvert
I recently bought a book of free verse. For twelve dollars. ~George Carlin, Napalm & Silly Putty, 2001
I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down. ~Robert Frost
Couldn't you play better tennis with the net down? ~Carl Sandburg
Much of the work usually known as "free verse" is not verse at all. Much of it is not poetry either. It has been aptly called "shredded prose." ~Marguerite Wilkinson, The Poetry of Our Own Times, 1926
Shredded prose is prose
Twisted in heat to occasional rhythms,
And broken savagely into irregular lengths,
And packed and sold as verse.
Yet
Our lives and thoughts are prose,
With only occasional bursts of rhythmic rapture
And with frequent broken jumps of change.
And so the prose-shredder
Often hits us in more intimate spots
Than the versifier,
It must be admitted.
~Everybody's Magazine, 1915
VERS LIBRE. A device for making poetry easier to write and harder to read. ~H. L. Mencken
The modern poet does not deny the right of regular verse to exist, or to be poetic. He merely affirms that poetry is sincerity, and has no essential alliance with regular schemes of any sort. He reserves the right to adapt his rhythm to his mood, to modulate his metre as he progresses. ~Herbert Read, Phases of English Poetry, 1928
The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry, darning, etc., for himself. In a few exceptional cases this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but as a rule the result is squalor — empty bottles on the unswept floor and dirty sheets on the unmade bed. ~W. H. Auden, "Squares and Oblongs," 1947
Poetry was music. Poetry was not the thing said, but continual evocation of delicious suggestions of meaning. Poetry was an unconscious crystallization of glittering images upon the bare twig of metre. Poetry, at the nadir of this search for its essence, became the formless babble and vomit of the poet's subconscious mind. ~A. D. Hope, 1957
Modern poets mix a good deal of water with their ink. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by Henry Attwell
Modern poets are bells of lead. They should tinkle melodiously but usually they just klunk. ~Lord Dunsany, 1954
Poetry is not imagination, but imagination shaped. Not feeling, but feeling expressed symbolically; the formless suggested indirectly through form. Hence the form is an essential element of poetry. And, the form in which poetical feeling expresses itself is infinitely varied. ~Frederick W. Robertson, paraphrased from a lecture delivered before the Members of the Mechanics’ Institution, 1852
Whitman & Swinburne
Thus, Whitman set out to express in his poetry the soul of his Culture awakening into self-consciousness on its own soil. Not only is the Faustian soul self-conscious; it is eternally restless, constantly striving upward, and possesses a sense of spiritual infinity. All these characteristics are given expression in Whitman's poetry. ~Walt Whitman Review, 1976
Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me?
Did you find what I sang erewhile so hard to follow, to understand?
Why, I was not singing erewhile for you to follow, to understand — nor am I now;
— What to such as you, anyhow, such a poet as I? — therefore leave my works,
And go lull yourself with what you can understand;
For I lull nobody — and you will never understand me.
~Walt Whitman, "Did You Ask Dulcet Rhymes from Me?," Drum Taps, 1865
"Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me?" inquires Mr. Whitman of some extraordinary if not imaginary interlocutor; and proceeds, with some not ineffective energy of expression, to explain that "I lull nobody—and you will never understand me." No, my dear good sir—or camerado: not in the wildest visions of a distempered slumber could I ever have dreamed of doing anything of the kind. The question of whether your work is in any sense poetry has no more to do with dulcet rhymes than with the differential calculus. The question is whether you have any more right to call yourself a poet, or to be called a poet by any man who knows verse from prose, or black from white, or speech from silence, or his right hand from his left, than to call yourself or to be called, on the strength of your published writings, a mathematician, a painter, a political economist, a dynamiter, a civil engineer, an amphimacer, a rhomboid, or a rectangular parallelogram. ~Algernon Charles Swinburne, "Whitmania," The Fortnightly Review, 1887 August 1st [a little altered
To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too. ~Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman … the remarkable American rhapsodist who has inoculated readers and writers with ethical and æsthetic rabies … the genuine energy and the occasional beauty of his feverish and convulsive style of writing … energetic emotion and sonorous expression … a style of rhetoric not always flatulent or inharmonious … exuberant incontinence … so pitiful a profession or ambition as that of a versifier … such were the flute-notes of Diogenes Devilsdung … James Macpherson could at least evoke shadows; Martin Tupper and Walt Whitman can only accumulate words … Mr. Whitman's Eve is a drunken apple-woman, indecently sprawling in the slush and garbage of the gutter amid the rotten refuse of her overturned fruit-stall; his Venus a Hottentot wench under the influence of cantharides and adulterated rum … the sources of inspiration which infuse into its chaotic jargon some passing or seeming notes of cosmic beauty, and diversify with something of occasional harmony the strident and barren discord of its jarring and erring atoms … but there is a thrilling and fiery force in his finest bursts of gusty rhetoric… ~Algernon Charles Swinburne, phrases extracted from "Whitmania," in The Fortnightly Review, 1887 August 1st [a little altered
She took up the volume of Swinburne and began reading it mechanically by the flickering candlelight. The rolling, copious phrases conveyed little meaning to her, but she liked the music of them.... A great tear splashing down across The Triumph of Time recalled her to herself. Often and often, with secret contempt and astonishment, had she seen Esther dissolved in tears over her favourite poets. Should she grow in time to be like Esther, undignified, unreserved? ~Amy Levy (1861–1889), Reuben Sachs: A Sketch, 1888
"Poetry is..."
Poetry is frosted fire. ~J. Patrick Lewis, "Poetry Is…", 2010
Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes. ~Joseph Roux (1834–1905), Meditations of a Parish Priest, 1886, translated from French by Isabel F. Hapgood
Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. ~Christopher Fry
Poetry is life distilled. ~Gwendolyn Brooks
Poetry is a blind date with enchantment. ~J. Patrick Lewis, "Poetry Is…", 2010
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. ~Percy Shelley
Poetry is a pack-sack of invisible keepsakes. ~Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the log of man's fugitive castaway soul upon a doomed and derelict planet. ~Christopher Morley (1890–1957), "The Autogenesis of a Poet," c.1920
Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. ~Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps. ~Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. ~Carl Sandburg
Poetry is experience’s armor against oblivion. ~J. Patrick Lewis, "Poetry Is…", 2010
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason. ~Samuel Johnson
Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables. ~Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge... ~William Wordsworth
Poetry is the tunnel at the end of the light. ~J. Patrick Lewis, "Poetry Is…", 2010
Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters. ~Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a greased pole to the castle in the air. ~J. Patrick Lewis, "Poetry Is…", 2010
Poetry is a glass, half-fuel. ~J. Patrick Lewis, "Poetry Is…", 2010
Poetry is creative; to be a poet is to remake the universe. ~Alexandre Vinet
Poetry is art with words and art is poetry without words. ~Quoted in the Moralia of Plutarch as an "oft-repeated saying" [Loeb, 1927: "poetry is articulate painting, and painting is inarticulate poetry"
Poetry is a perfectly reasonable means of overcoming chaos. ~I. A. Richards (1893–1979)
Poetry is the overflowing of the soul. ~Henry T. Tuckerman, "Bryant," Thoughts on the Poets, 1850
Poetry is more than verse-making, more than the jingle of words, more than the sing-song of meter.... Without poetry, life is a tread-mill; a veil of tears; a dreary waste. ~Author unknown, c.1895 [possibly Silas X. Floyd
Poetry widens the mental and emotional scope. It brings a stimulating zest to life. ~H. A. Overstreet, About Ourselves: Psychology for Normal People, 1927
Poetry is found in various shapes,
As vital or mental the mixture takes,
Or roundness or sharpness passion awakes...
~H. W. Jeffree, Life: An Epic, "Book IV," written 1861, revised 1874
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat. ~Robert Frost, 1963
All poetry is simply an escape from reality. It says what is palpably not true. The only difference between poets is a difference in the kind of escape they crave. Some are content with visions of a pretty girl who is also a good cook and pays for the marketing out of her own funds; others demand the insane consolations of metaphysics, or the hiding-place of a jargon no one can understand. ~H. L. Mencken
In essence, poetry is the love of life... ~Christopher Morley (1890–1957), "The Autogenesis of a Poet," c.1920
And poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is. ~James Branch Cabell
Poetry: Miscellaneous
Well! well! I grow poetic... ~Hughes Mearns, Richard Richard, 1916
The whole art of poetry — Calling everything something else. ~Charles Searle, Look Here!, 1885
Poetry,—the language of the Imagination and the Passions,—the oldest and most beauteous offspring of Literature. ~Frederick Hinde, Poetry, a lecture delivered in London on the evening of April 8, 1858
It is not pathetic passages that make us shed our best tears, but the miracle of a word in the right place. ~Jean Cocteau
I would define... the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. ~Edgar Allan Poe
I should define poetry as the exquisite expression of exquisite impressions. ~Joseph Roux (1834–1905), Meditations of a Parish Priest, 1886, translated from French by Isabel F. Hapgood
All-pervading spirit to the ear
Blended with the movings of the soul
~James G. Percival, "Poetry," c.1822 [a little altered
To cut the Gordian knot is not the same as to untie it. Children and lunatics cut what the poet patiently spends his life in trying to untie. The cord will be used again by others, who must take another knot, and so on to the end of time. But in the hands of lunatics, or even the most wonderful children, nothing remains but loose ends. ~Jean Cocteau
I am a plume from the wings of night,
And a breath of the twilight calm;
I am the gleam of a burst of light,
And the echo of a psalm.
I am a dream of the future and past—
The breath of eternity;
I am the shadow of clouds floating fast
On the face of the summer sea.
I am the sound of the whispering rain,
A thrill of the lark above;
I am the presence of terrible pain,
And the spirit of holy love.
Mine is the beauty of mystical time—
The centuries fall light from my hand;
I hammer the heart of God into rhyme,
For I am the soul of Man.
~Elizabeth Zalesky, "The Spirit of Poetry"
Then, in what beauteous dress will Poetry oft clothe or decorate what in Prose is but too frequently flat and commonplace. ~Frederick Hinde, Poetry, a lecture delivered in London on the evening of April 8, 1858
Poetry slips a silk dress over naked prose. ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Seven Seventy Seven Sensations, 1897
Poetry should be a sacred thing... It should be, in fine, the historian of human nature in its fullest possible perfection, and the painter of all those lines and touches, in earth and heaven, which nothing, but taste, can see and feel. It should give to its forms the expression of angels, and throw over its pictures the hues of immortality. There can be but one extravagance in poetry; it is, to clothe feeble conceptions in mighty language. ~James G. Percival, Preface to Clio, 1822
I think poetry should... strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. ~John Keats, 1818
Words become luminous when the finger of the poet touches them with his phosphorus. ~Joseph Joubert, translated by George H. Calvert
One must forgive a large self-consciousness to a great poet. We cannot deny a certain Godlikeness to one who creates men from his brain. ~Marie Dubsky, Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916), translated by Mrs Annis Lee Wister, 1882
ever been kidnapped
by a poet
if i were a poet
i'd kidnap you
put you in my phrases and meter...
~Nikki Giovanni, "Kidnap Poem," c.1970
A poet is never free enough. ~Jean Cocteau
True poetry forever lasts... ~Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585), translated by Curtis Hidden Page, 1903
I had a dream, I had a horrid dream.
I dreamt that Byron travels for a house
That handles wines from Portugal and Spain,
That Shelley is a cashier of a bank,
That Keats is valet to a wealthy Jew,
That Oscar Wilde lays bricks, that Edgar Poe
Is selling silks and satins on the road,
And that Walt Whitman, he of noble height,
Is manager of a department store.
And I would have dreamed on, had not disgust,
A flood of dire disgust, awakened me,
And I myself was forced to rush downtown
To live the life I shudder at in dream.
~Adolf Wolff (1883–1944), "Nightmare," Songs, Sighs and Curses, 1913
...if the author had said, "Let us put on appropriate galoshes," there could, of course, have been no poem... ~Author unknown, analysis of Elinor Wylie's "Velvet Shoes," 1948 [quoted by David Wagoner at the beginning of his poem "Walking in the Snow," the first line of which is "Let us put on appropriate galoshes..."
There is often as much poetry between the lines of a poem as in those lines. ~Alexandre Vinet
Poetry! poetry! the emptiest of all words, or the most significant,—the most frivolous of all things, or the most important. ~Alexandre Vinet
WANTED: A needle swift enough
To sew this poem into a blanket.
~Charles Simic, 1969
In the nineteenth century a revival of literature was followed by a revival of beards, and the reign of Queen Victoria was as prolific of bearded men of letters and bearded artists as the reign of Queen Elizabeth had been. It is strange that queens and beards should thus go together. Queen Anne alone seems to have ruled over men of genius who grew no beards. It would be worth some statistician's while to go through the great names of English literature and compare the amount of genius that has gone bearded with the amount of genius that has been clean-shaven... The great ages of prose are the ages in which men shave. The great ages of poetry are those in which they allow their beards to grow... ~Robert Lynd, "Beaver," 1922
'T is not the chime and flow of words, that move
In measured file, and metrical array...
Nor all the pleasing artifice of rhyme...
'T is a mysterious feeling, which combines
Man with the world around him, in a chain
Woven of flowers, and dipped in sweetness, till
He taste the high communion of his thoughts,
With all existences, in earth and heaven,
That meet him in the charm of grace and power.
~James G. Percival, "Poetry," c.1822
The poet needs to admire; he is in a merely human sense the high priest of the true, the beautiful, the grand. On whatever side he spreads his wings it is his mission to bear the universal homage to these worthy objects, or to some ideas of them. ~Alexandre Vinet
...the purest poetry is nothing less than magic... ~W. J. Dawson, "The Family Album," The Autobiography of a Mind, 1925
So the poetic feeling needs no words
To give it utterance; but it swells, and glows,
And revels in the ecstasies of soul,
And sits at banquet with celestial forms...
~James G. Percival, "Poetry," c.1822
Beauty is the true meaning of poetry. But after all nothing is said; and a thinker, a sensitive mind, will extract more from the simple word itself than can be embodied in a hundred varnished phrases. ~Thomas Clark Henley, "Beauty," 1851
poets swing too high
until the chain kinks
and snaps mid-air
the
fall
is
poetry
~Terri Guillemets, terriguillemets.com
...true poets... can pierce through the clouds to the light, and save the purity of their inspiration from the general disorder. ~Alexandre Vinet
The poet's disorder becomes an order which is rejected by conventional disorder. ~Jean Cocteau
She comes like the husht beauty of the night,
And sees too deep for laughter:
Her touch is a vibration and a light
From worlds before and after.
~Edwin Markham, "Poesy," Gates of Paradise and Other Poems, 1920
The history of poetry is not exclusively and identically the history of works written in verse. Poetry dwells in prose writings as well; nay, is necessarily met with there, for poetry is less a class of writings than a breath unequally but generally diffused throughout literature: it is whatever raises us from the real to the ideal; whatever brings the prosaic in contact with our imaginations; whatever in any intellectual work echoes within the soul; it is the beauty of all beautiful things; it penetrates into spheres apparently most foreign to it; and what Voltaire has said of happiness may be equally said of poetry,—"She resembles fire, whose gentle heat secretly insinuates itself into all other elements, descends into rocks, rises in the cloud, reddens the coral in the sand of the seas, and lives in icicles that winters have hardened." ~Alexandre Vinet
...the sensitive glow of poetry. ~Thomas Clark Henley, A Handful of Paper Shavings, 1861
We ask the poet: 'What subject have you chosen' instead of: 'What subject has chosen you?' ~Marie Dubsky, Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916), translated by Mrs Annis Lee Wister, 1882
The poem is, then, a little myth of man's capacity for making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see — it is, rather, a light by which we may see — and what we see is life. ~Robert Penn Warren, 1958
The poet must have his experiences — be sure that nine tenths of them are purely of the imagination... He gloats over his sins — is musically remorseful or swingingly defiant; he hints or exaggerates or invents. The poet's imagination is often far more licentious than his life. ~Israel Zangwill (1864–1926)
His home is in the heights: to him
Men wage a battle weird and dim...
The perilous music that he hears
Falls from the vortice of the spheres...
~Edwin Markham, "The Poet"
A poet acquires a kind of spiritual jurisdiction over the places he has sojourned in and the hills he has haunted. ~W.H. Gresswell, "A Poet's Corner," 1889
...my father... was an ardent Wordsworthian. He knew most of the Prelude by heart. Sometimes, unexpectedly breaking that profound and god-like silence with which he always enveloped himself, he would quote a line or two. The effect was always portentous; it was as though an oracle had spoken. ~Aldous Huxley, Those Barren Leaves, 1925
The eye is the only note-book of the true poet... ~James Russell Lowell, 1866
His rhymes the poet flings at all men's feet,
And whoso will may trample on his rhymes.
Should Time let die a song that's true and sweet
The singer's loss were more than match'd by Time's.
~William Watson, "'Subjectivity' in Art," Epigrams of Art, Life, and Nature, 1884
Your prayer can be poetry, and poetry can be your prayer. ~Terri Guillemets, terriguillemets.com
So we dreamt a dream. And there seemed to arise the Poet. And he seemed to say, There is a man who sits and thinks,—thinks deeply. And his fancy draws up forms and facts from The Beautiful. And a pen writes them down; and it is Poetry, and he is a Poet. ~"Architecture," The Fine Arts' Journal, 1846 November 7th
Theodore—"I was at first afraid that he was one of those numerous poets who have driven poetry from the earth, one of those stringers of sham pearls who can see nothing in the world but the last syllables of words, and who when they have rhymed glade with shade, flame with name, and God with trod, conscientiously cross their legs and arms and suffer the spheres to complete their revolution."
Rosette—"He is not one of those. His verses are inferior to him and do not contain him. What he has written would give you a very false idea of his own person; his true poem is himself, and I do not know whether he will ever compose another. In the recesses of his soul he has a seraglio of beautiful ideas which he surrounds with a triple wall, and of which he is more jealous than was ever sultan of his odalisques. He only puts those into his verses which he does not care about or which have repulsed him; it is the door through which he drives them away, and the world has only those which he will keep no longer." ~Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, 1835
Poetry is perfect verbs hunting for elusive nouns. ~J. Patrick Lewis, "Poetry Is…", 2010
Poets should fear adjectives like the plague. ~Jean Cocteau
The one who builds the poem into fact,
He is the rightful owner of it all...
~Edwin Markham, "Song Made Flesh"
The Phœnix is also very much like an intelligent eagle, with gold and crimson plumage and an exceptionally waggish tail. It has the advantage of fifty orifices in his bill, through which he occasionally sings melodious songs to oblige the company. As he never appears to anyone more than once in five hundred years, sometimes, when he has the toothache for instance, only once in a thousand years—which is why he is called a rara avis—if you ever meet him at any time take particular notice of him. And if you can draw, if it is only the long bow, make a sketch of him. He lives chiefly on poets—which is why so many refer to him. He has been a good friend to the poets of all ages, as your cousin William will explain. If you have not got a cousin William, ask some one who has. ~S. J. Adair Fitz-Gerald (1859–1925), The Zankiwank & The Bletherwitch, 1896
Shelley is the ideal of a poet, a soul of white fire, fed by bread and raisins... ~Israel Zangwill
Invariably pure and austere, poets mostly
starve to death embracing empty mountains,
and when white clouds have no master,
they just drift off, idle thoughts carefree.
~Meng Chiao, translated by David Hinton
I suppose you will be spending the day-after-the-day-after-tomorrow in right genial and right royal fashion, worthy of the most genial of geniuses and most regal of poets, whose Commemoration Day it is. ~Mary Victoria Novello Cowden Clarke, 1853 April 20th, letter to Robert Balmanno [Shakespeare
A rose in sunlight is nature.
A rose in the dark is poetry.
~Terri Guillemets
We need the knowledge of the poet, the prophet and the deeper things of life... ~Joseph F. Daniels, "The Empty Heart" (A Paper Read on the Educational Future of Libraries before the Library Section of the Colorado Teachers' Association, 1908 December 29th)
Life, for Cocteau, meant poetry. ~Margaret Crosland, 1972
The desert attracts the nomad; the ocean, the sailor; the infinite, the poet. ~Joseph Roux, translated by Isabel F. Hapgood
What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed? ~W. H. Auden, 1956
The rhymes are dazzled from their place,
And order'd words asunder fly.
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Sleeping Beauty," 1830
It is curious how few creatures, even in higher walks of life, really like poetry... ~Israel Zangwill, 1893
Thomas Holley Chivers is at the same time one of the best and one of the worst poets in America. His productions affect one as a wild dream — strange, incongruous, full of images of more than arabesque monstrosity, and snatches of sweet unsustained song. Even his worst nonsense (and some of it is horrible) has an indefinite charm of sentiment and melody.
Poets yawn at business,
balk at politics, and believe
words the only currency.
~Terri Guillemets, terriguillemets.com
A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him. ~Dylan Thomas
Words are rather the drossy part of poetry; imagination the life of it. ~Owen Felltham
Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
Nor time unmake what poets know.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Test"
[P]oets... tremble on the syllable of lovely meanings... ~Christopher Morley
Poetry touches upon the entire spectrum,
from lost to found —
and sometimes back again.
~Terri Guillemets
If it is a wild tune, it is a poem... Theme alone can steady us down. Just as the first mystery was how a poem could have a tune in such a straightness as meter, so the second mystery is how a poem can have wildness and at the same time a subject that shall be fulfilled. It should be of the pleasure of the poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. ~Robert Frost
Residual light faintly illumes
Groping pages of poets and sages,
Little candles in infinite dark.
~Cave Outlaw (1900–1996), "Cult of the Phoenix"
Poetry walks the line — a bit unbalanced — between self and world. ~Terri Guillemets
A poem consists of such a delicate balance and loss of balance, it has a gait so stiff and light... ~Jean Cocteau
The ugly is in poetry only a passing shadow. ~Alexandre Vinet
The poetry of a given age teaches us less what it has, than what it wants and what it loves. It is a living medal, where the concavities in the die are transformed into convexities on the bronze or gold. ~Alexandre Vinet
Shakspere is the king of poets... ~Frederick William Robinson, Under the Spell, 1870
Does not poetry itself lose somewhat in detaching itself so entirely from the reality whence it proceeds, and fixing itself thus solitary in aërial heights? ~Alexandre Vinet
It sometimes seems to me (it is an error, I confess, but one into which I am for ever falling) that poetry is no longer anything more than an imitation of poetry... ~Alexandre Vinet
There is nothing more humble than a poet. He is only a vehicle. What gives him an air of pride is that he defends the strength that dwells within him, as Joan of Arc defended the cause of God. ~Jean Cocteau
Why should I thus feel all on glow and flame,
Or strive to mark what I can never name;
Could but my pen and ink describe as clear,
As I that awful grandeur now feel here.
~H. W. Jeffree, Life: An Epic, "Book IV," written 1861, revised 1874
Once a poet wakes up he is stupid, I mean intelligent. 'Where am I?' he asks, like ladies who have fainted. Notes written by a poet who is awake are not worth much. ~Jean Cocteau
...poetry, that pearl of intelligence and life, reflects on our brow some pale rays of the glory that has faded away from it. ~Alexandre Vinet
...poetry... folds its wings at the rough contact of reality... it feels in one sense much more, and in another much less, than the soul engaged with reality... ~Alexandre Vinet
...poetry shares our misery, it is agitated with all our uneasiness; like us, it goes, comes, flies, never rests. ~Alexandre Vinet
The poet sees and selects from on high and afar, and hardly inquires about what is near at hand. ~Alexandre Vinet
A poet is at first not read. Then he is read inaccurately. Then he becomes a classic and habit prevents people from reading him. All in all, he keeps for ever his few early lovers. ~Jean Cocteau
If thou (Reader) art one of those, who has been warm'd with Poetick Fire, I reverence thee as my Judg... ~William D'Avenant, 1650
My poem may be a weed, but it has sprung, unforced, out of existing things. It may not suit the circulating libraries for adult babies; but it is the earnest product of experience, a retrospect of the past, and an evidence of the present—a sign of the times—a symptom, terrible, or otherwise, which our state doctors will do well to observe with the profoundest shake of the head... ~Ebenezer Elliott (1781–1849), Preface to Corn Law Rhymes, 1831 [the poetry of politics
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