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Quotes about poetry

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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 the case of poetry, it’s the exact opposite!
Paul Dirac1902–1984
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
T. S. Eliot1888–1965
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
Robert Frost1874–1963
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
Robert Frost1874–1963
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
Christopher Morley1890–1957
A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.
Robert Frost1874–1963BBC Interview with Cecil Day Lewis (13 September 1957); transcripts published in “It Takes a Hero to Make a Poem” in the Claremont Quarterly (Spring 1958)
Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have: Cincinnati sounds worse.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.1809–1894
The one man who should never attempt an explanation on poetry is its author. If the poem can be improved by its author’s explanations, it never should have been published.
Archibald MacLeish1892–1982
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
Emily Dickinson1830–1886Letter to T. W. Higginson (1870); Letters (1958) p. 474, no. 342a
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
Emily Dickinson1830–1886Letter to T. W. Higginson (1870); Letters (1958) p. 474, no. 342a
The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.
Lionel Trilling1905–1975The Liberal Imagination (1950), Freud and Literature
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
H. L. Mencken1880–1956Minority Report: H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks (1956), 13
A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of Creation.
Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900
- God
We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.
Niels Bohr1885–1962In his first meeting with Werner Heisenberg in early summer 1920, in response to questions on the nature of language, as reported in Discussions about Language (1933); quoted in Defense Implications of International Indeterminacy (1972) by Robert J. …
- Science
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert1821–1880Letters to Madame Louise Colet, 14 August 1853