ON POETRY
"The poem, in a sense, is no more or less than a little machine for remembering itself ... Poetry is therefore primarily a commemorative act"
Don Paterson
"A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years",
Allen Ginsberg
"The job of the poet (a job which can't be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force",
Jean Cocteau
"All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment",
T.S. Eliot
"Art is not truth. It is a lie that makes us realize truth",
Georges Braque
“The poet's mind is "a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feeling, phrases and images, which remain there until all the particles, which can unite to form a new compound are present together"
T.S. Eliot
"The ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes"
T.S. Eliot
"Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words"
Wei Tei
"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes it's origin from emotion
recollected in tranquillity."
William Wordsworth
"A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightening five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great."
Randall Jarrell
"Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth."
Philip Larkin
"Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down."
Robert Frost
"To break the pentameter, that was the first heave."
Ezra Pound
"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression ofpersonality, 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
"Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people."
Adrian Mitchell
"No man can read Hardy's poems collected but that his own life, and forgotten moments of it, will come back to him, in a flash here and an hour there. Have you a better test of true poetry?"
Ezra Pound
"I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is prose; words in their best order; - poetry; the best words in the best order."
S.T.Coleridge
"Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realising that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions.
Ezra Pound
"Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air".
Carl Sandburg
"Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing
Did certain persons die before they sing."
S.T.Coleridge
“I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I
occasionally snip off a length.”
John Ashbery
“Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nthpower. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.”
Paul Engle
“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.”
Allen Ginsberg
“Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature,
but the measure can be acquired by art.”
Thomas Hardy
“Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity—it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
John Keats
“Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal [but]
which the reader recognizes as his own.”
Salvatore Quasimodo
“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
W.B Yeats
11:08:39 PM 
|
