Contemporary Quotations on Poetry Options

[Cleo_Serapis]

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.” ~ W H Auden

“Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.” ~ Maxwell Bodenheim

“Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.” ~ Joseph Brodsky

“The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.” ~ Jean Cocteau

“[Poetry] may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.” ~ T S Eliot

“But maybe it’s up in the hills under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it’s never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is always only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.” ~ Paul Engle

“Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation … Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you’re going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power.” ~ Robert Frost

“Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race.” ~ Stanley Kunitz

“Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.” ~ Archibald MacLeish

“Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.” ~ Jacques Maritain

“Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.” ~ Boris Pasternak

“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

“It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.” ~ Richard Wilbur