WHAT IS POETRY: SOME QUOTES
"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can
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 it. Is there any other way?"
––Emily Dickinson
"There are all kinds of song. The genres are 'work-song, a personal
power-vision song, war song, death song, courting song, hunting
song'--all of these are used by people for their own needs and uses.
But the special genre is healing song. The Shaman was the specialist
in that. He returned to his power-vision song experience many times
and deepened it over and over again, whereas other people had one
power-vision song and that was enough. The power of this type of
song--the power that the Shaman connects with--enables him to hear
and to see a certain classic song which has the capacity to heal. And
I think that we could say that self-conscious, quote, 'literary' poetry of
the sort that has been transmitted for the last two millenniums in the
West--the best of it belongs to that genre: “healing song'’
––Gary Snyder
"The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just
one person."
––Czeslaw Milosz
"Poetry is essentially the soul's search for its release in language."
––Joseph Brodsky
“Where there is amenability to paraphrase, where the sheets have
never been rumpled, there poetry, so to speak, has never spent the
night.”
––Osip Mandelstam
“Poets think they're pitchers when they're really catchers.”
––Jack Spicer
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WHAT IS POETRY: SOME QUOTES
“Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.”
––Octavio Paz
“In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: a thing
brought forth which we didn't know we had in us, so we blink our
eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out and stood in the light, lashing its
tail."
––Czeslaw Milosz
“All good poetry depends on the ethical relation between imagination
and the image. Images are not ornaments; they are truths.”
––Eavan Boland
“If you only knew from what rubbish
Poetry grows, knowing no shame,
Like a yellow dandelion by the fence,
Like burdock and goosefoot.”
––Anna Akhmatova
“Poetry proves again and again that any single overall theory of
anything doesn't work. Poetry is always the cat concert under the
window of the room in which the official version of reality is being
written.”
––Charles Simic
“Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.”
––Robert Frost
“There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people
confuse it with the Salvation Army.”
––John Ashbery
“Poetry is what is what Milton saw when he went blind.”
––Don Marquis
“Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand
Canyon and waiting for the echo."
––Don Marquis
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WHAT IS POETRY: SOME QUOTES
“If there is no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.”
––Robert Graves
"The rhythmic creation of beauty in words."
––William Packard
"I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the
emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity
gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was
before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does
itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition
generally begins, and in a mood similar to this is carried on; but the
emotion, of whatever kind and in whatever degree, from various
causes is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any
passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will
upon the whole be in a state of enjoyment."
––William Wordsworth
"The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him
that he has taken an immortal wound––that he will never get over it."
––Robert Frost
Poetry is the way words "come together into some kind of magical
conjunction that will make the reader enter into a real experience of
his own--not the poet's. I don't really believe what literary critics have
believed from the beginning of time: that poetry is an attempt of the
poet to create or recreate his own experience and to pass it on. I
don't believe in that. I believe it's an awakening of the sensibilities of
someone else, the stranger."
––James Dickey
Poetry is "voice music. Ancient poetry was all produced for that
purpose. And that's still a very strong tradition. . . .When I write, I
always hear the voice in my head. I'm baffled that there is even a
question about it."
––Erica Jong
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WHAT IS POETRY: SOME QUOTES
Poetry is "that species of composition, which is opposed to works of
science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and
from all other species...it is discriminated by proposing to itself such
delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification
from each component part."
––Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own
melting.”
––Robert Frost
"One of the great practical uses of the literary disciplines, of course,
is to resist glibness--to slow language down and make it thoughtful.
This accounts, particularly, for the influence of verse, in its formal
aspect, within the dynamics of the growth of language: verse checks
the merely impulsive flow of speech, subjects it to another pulse, to
measure…by inducing the hesitations of difficulty, it admits into
language the influence of the Muse and of musing."
––Wendell Berry
"It is not rhyming and versing that maketh poetry. One may be a poet
without versing, and a versifyer without poetry."
––Philip Sidney
"What is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not.
We all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is."
––Samuel Johnson
“Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.”
––Denis Diderot
“No one lives in this room
without confronting the whiteness of the wall
behind the poems, planks of books,
photographs of dead heroines.
Without contemplating last and late
the true nature of poetry. The drive
to connect. The dream of a common language.”
––Adrienne Rich
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WHAT IS POETRY: SOME QUOTES
"When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of
his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern,
poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When
power corrupts, poetry cleanses."
––John F. Kennedy
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