AN EDUCATION ON POETRY (Part 1) Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. Edgar Allan Poe Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. Percy Bysshe Shelley Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. Aristotle I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean. Socrates To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears. Octavio Paz Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. Carl Sandburg The poet doesn't invent. He listens. Jean Cocteau Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own. Salvatore Quasimodo Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully. William C. Bryant Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. William Hazlitt Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry. Charles Baudelaire Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. Samuel Johnson Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. Rita Dove Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry. Georges Braque Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. Eli Khamarov Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them. Dennis Gabor God is the perfect poet. Robert Browning Poetry is the deification of reality. Edith Sitwell Poetry and music are very good friends. Like mommies and daddies and strawberries and cream they go together. Nikki Giovanni Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe. Adrienne Rich Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry. Gustave Flaubert If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. Emily Dickinson Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life. William Rose Benet Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence. Edmund Clarence Stedman A grain of poetry suffices to season a century. Jose Marti
AN EDUCATION ON POETRY (Part 2) If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness. Seamus Heaney Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle. Edwin Hubbel Chapin Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation. Robert Fitzgerald The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it. Mahmoud Darwish Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets. Federico Fellini Poetry is life distilled. Gwendolyn Brooks Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life. John Betjeman Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings. Umberto Eco Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen. Gertrude Stein If food is poetry, is not poetry also food? Joyce Carol Oates Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers. Yevgeny Yevtushenko I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry. Rita Dove I see poetry as spiritual medicine. Mahmoud Darwish The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams. Gaston Bachelard Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born. Daisaku Ikeda Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country. It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world. Richard Eberhart All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears. Lord Alfred Douglas Poetry is composing for the breath. Peter Davison Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. Percy Bysshe Shelley Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature. David Hare Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it. Maurice Druon Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know. Joseph Roux Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people. Adrian Mitchell
AN EDUCATION ON POETRY (Part 3) Poetry is that sentiment of the soul, or faculty of the mind, which enables its possessor to appreciate and realize the heights and depths of human experience. It is the power to feel pleasure or suffer pain in all its exquisiteness and intensity. Orson F. Whitney Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go. Laura Riding Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions. Joseph Roux Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is. James Broughton No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it. Felix Dennis What is poetry which does not save nations or people? Czeslaw Milosz I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet. Bob Dylan I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular. Amy Winehouse I read poetry to save time. Marilyn Monroe I go to the gym, do some martial arts, and I love poetry. I have a tattoo of my family crest, and another on my back that says 'The Road Not Taken,' which is a poem by Robert Frost. Steven R. McQueen I love romantic poetry. Richard Dawkins Wine is bottled poetry. Robert Louis Stevenson Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. T. S. Eliot In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite. Paul Dirac A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. W. H. Auden Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Percy Bysshe Shelley A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. Salman Rushdie A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. Wallace Stevens Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them. Charles Simic We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words. John Fowles 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 comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up. Keith Haring
AN EDUCATION ON POETRY (Part 4) Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art. Thomas Hardy Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry. Virginia Woolf When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love. Umberto Eco Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down. Mahmoud Darwish I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator. Allen Ginsberg Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that. Mary Oliver People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work. Mary Oliver Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew. Anthony Hecht Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising. David Whyte The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy. James Broughton Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading. Jack Prelutsky Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is. James Branch Cabell Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living. Vanessa Redgrave Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love. Erica Jong Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief - everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies. F. Sionil Jose Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else. William Hazlitt I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive. Anthony Hopkins Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. Juan Ramon Jimenez In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime. Phyllis McGinley As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines. Thomas Babington Macaulay Poetry is a mere drug, Sir. George Farquhar Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler. Mark Strand The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. Jean Cocteau
AN EDUCATION ON POETRY (Part 5) Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry. Salvatore Quasimodo I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation. Anthony Hope Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you. Ellen Bass Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language. Lucille Clifton Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence. J. G. Stedman I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation, and so I've looked at specific poems I love, and at poetry's gestures in the broadest sense, in an effort to feel and learn what they offer from the inside. Jane Hirshfield For me, prose walks, poetry dances. James Broughton Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable. Jane Hirshfield Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination. Ishmael Reed If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. M. H. Abrams The crown of literature is poetry. W. Somerset Maugham Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content. Alfred de Musset Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. Marianne Moore A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. Yevgeny Yevtushenko Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race. Johann Georg Hamann 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. James Gates Percival If you been to heaven then you know what language they speak. Meredith Meredith Poetry is the language of the gods. Meredith Meredith God created the Universe in poem and man with a prose. Meredith Meredith You don’t compose a poem you wait on the poem to compose you. Meredith Meredith Pure poetry emanates from a pure heart. Meredith Meredith Poetry comes in the solitude of silence in the meekness of stillness. Meredith Meredith Hardships doles the senses poetry invigorates the senses. Meredith Meredith The best poets are the ones educated in the school of life. Meredith Meredith If you find a poet best you marry the poet or suffer your greatest loss. Meredith Meredith