3 December 2020 John Barton Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.
3 December 2020 James Joyce Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
3 December 2020 Mark Strand Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
3 December 2020 William C. Bryant 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.
3 December 2020 Lawrence Summers In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.
3 December 2020 Anne Stevenson I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.
3 December 2020 John Keats Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
3 December 2020 Leonard Cohen I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he’s written poetry then let the verdict be that he’s a poet.
3 December 2020 John Barton In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.
3 December 2020 John Drinkwater Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.
3 December 2020 Laura Riding The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind… The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.
3 December 2020 Robert Frost A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
3 December 2020 W. S. Merwin Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing.
3 December 2020 W. H. Auden Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
3 December 2020 Gaston Bachelard The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.
3 December 2020 Robert Morgan I think that it’s more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
3 December 2020 Carol Ann Duffy I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.
3 December 2020 Georges Braque Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.
3 December 2020 Don Marquis Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
3 December 2020 Robert Morgan Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
3 December 2020 Marianne Moore I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.
3 December 2020 Robert Morgan Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it’s timeless, that it reaches back.
