Twenty four Quotes About Poetry: Who Said What?

“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?”

“Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.”

“Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.”

“To make two bold statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem, I mean that there can be no part that is redundant. Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is a machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.”

“If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.”

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.”

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

“Poetry: aviation! Prose: infantry.”

“A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the — not always greatly hopeful — belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something.”

“The reason modern poetry is difficult is so that the poet’s wife cannot understand it.”

“A poem must be a debacle of the intellect. It cannot be anything but… Poetry is the opposite of literature. It rules over idols of every kind and over realistic illusions; it happily sustains the ambiguity between the language of “truth” and the language of “creation.” Poetry is a pipe. Lyricism is the development of a protest. How proud a thing it is to write, without knowing what language, words, comparisons, changes of ideas, of tone are; neither to conceive the structure of the work’s duration, nor the conditions of its ends; no why, no how! To turn green, blue, white from being the parrot… We are always, even in prose, led and willing to write what we have not sought and what perhaps does not even seek what we sought. Perfection is laziness.”

“… of the many definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best: ‘memorable speech’.”

“As a poet, I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth; the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.”

“Poema pictura loquens, pictura poema silens,” which translates as: ”Poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent poetry.”

“Poetry is that / which arrives at the intellect / by way of the heart.”

"My poems do not turn out to be about Hiroshima, but about a child forming itself finger by finger in the dark. They are not about the terrors of mass extinction, but about the bleakness of the moon over a yew tree in a neighbouring graveyard … In a sense these poems are deflections. I do not think they are an escape.”

“Poetry is truth seen with passion.”

“Poetry; the best words in the best order.”

“Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.”

“Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.”

“The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights.”

"The poem is a form of texting… it’s the original text. It’s a perfecting of a feeling in language – it’s a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.”

“The figure of the poem (is) a labyrinthine nest in which the kingfisher might want to settle. The poem is a lure for an elusive and speechless spirit which we can think of as the real basis of the lyrical impulse.”

“Poetry is a search for ways of communication; it must be conducted with openness, flexibility, and a constant readiness to listen.”