Quotes on Poetry

Poetry amounts to arranging words with the greatest specific
gravity in the most effective and externally inevitable sequence.
- Joseph Brodsky

A poem is an instant of lucidity in which
the entire organism participates.
- Charles Simic

Each memorable verse of a true poet has
two or three times the written content.
- Alfred de Musset

Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from
the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from
what your teacher taught you to do in school.
- Margaret Atwood

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 ...
- Boris Pasternak

The two most engaging powers of an author are to
make new things familiar, and familiar things new.
- Samuel Johnson

Poetry which owes no man anything, owes nevertheless one debt --
an image of the world in which men can again believe.
- Archibald MacLeish

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.
- Ezra Pound

There are two ways of disliking poetry, one way is to dislike it,
the other is to read Pope.
- Oscar Wilde

Language ...is an infinitude of used or potential poems
waiting to be molded into new realities.
- Friedrich