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Quotes about poetry

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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
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)
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
Robert Frost1874–1963Address at Milton Academy, Massachusetts (May 17, 1935)
- Writing
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.
Robert Frost1874–1963The Figure a Poem Makes (1939)
- Writing
The world’s history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word.
James A. Garfield1831–1881The Province of History (c. 1856), Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 620
- History
All along the backwater,
Through the rushes tall,
Ducks are a-dabbling,
Up tails all!
Kenneth Grahame1859–1932The Wind in the Willows (1908), Chapter IIIn context
- Animals
To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.
Robert Graves1895–1985Reply to questionnaire, “The Cost of Letters” in Horizon (September 1946)
A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end.
Robert Graves1895–1985The Paris Review, “Writers at Work: 4th series,” interview with Peter Buckman and William Fifield (1969)
Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.
Nathaniel Hawthorne1804–1864The Marble Faun (1860), Chapter XLI: Snowdrops and Maidenly Delights
- Art
All that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it.
William Hazlitt1778–1830Lectures on the English Poets (1818), Lecture I, “On Poetry in General”
- Life & Death
Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have: Cincinnati sounds worse.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.1809–1894
Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.
Homer900–800 BCThe Odyssey (8th century BC), Book IIn context
In all great poetry there is a kind of “kenosis” of the understanding, a self-emptying of the tongue. Here language points away from itself to something greater than itself.
L. P. Jacks1860–1955The Usurpation Of Language (1910)
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
William James1842–1910Collected Essays and Reviews (1920), Ch. 11—Clifford’s Lectures and Essays (1879)
- Science