POETRY - some quotes - throughout the semester, feel free to add to this bank of ideas on poetry!
In Poetry: A Very Short Introduction, Bernard O’Donoghue, notes that most theories of poetry (and art as such) in the Western tradition have evolved around the basic distinction between ‘the idea of poetry [...] as either imitative, or transcendent: either imitating lie or reality of nature, or surpassing those things in a way that somehow compensates for their deficiencies’.[1] Other ongoing arguments include the question about which is more important: the sense or the sound of poetry – its semantic or its sonic/material qualities. This is related to the idea that poetry either leads us to deeper knowledge of the world (or self-knowledge), or that it is concerned with providing aesthetic pleasure. Yet another distinction is found in the contrast between Shelley’s famous claim that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’,[2] and W. H. Auden’s counterclaim that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.[3] The latter idea is supported by James Longenbach’s argument that ‘the marginality of poetry is in many ways the source of its power, a power contingent on poetry’s capacity to resist itself more strenuously than it is resisted by the culture at large’.[4] Many conceptions of poetry and its role (answers to the questions of ‘What poetry is’ and ‘What it is for’), as you can see below, focus on its universality (despite its marginal status in most modern cultures), or on the importance of language and sound for the way poetry communicates its meaning.
FEEL FREE TO KEEP ADDING TO THIS BANK OF IDEAS ON POETRY – its possibilities as well as limitations!
[Poetry is] the first light-giver to ignorance. — Philip Sidney
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it. —Percy Bysshe Shelley
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 Dickinson
Poets fear wisdom. — James Longenbach
Poetry is my deepest health. — Sylvia Plath
Poems are moments’ monuments. — Sylvia Plath
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. — Paul Valéry
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. — Leonard Cohen.
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought, and the thought has found words. — Robert Frost
[Lyric as a form] stands or falls on the accuracy of language with which it reports the author’s emotional responses to the life around him. — Helen Vendler
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. — T. S. Eliot
I would define, in brief, the poetry of words, as the rhythmical creation of beauty. — Edgar Allan Poe
Poetry is a composition of words set to music. Most other definitions of it are indefensible or metaphysical. — E. A. Poe
The poem: a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense. — Paul Valéry
Poet is the One Who, on Behalf of Others and for their Benefit, Maintains a Friendship with Language. — Petr Borkovec
Poetry is words. — A. C. Bradley
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. — Rita Dove
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. — W. H. Auden
Poetry is the form of supreme locution in any culture. — Joseph Brodsky
[P]oetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men. [...] National literature is now an unmeaning terms; the epoch of world literature is at hand. — J. W. Goethe
[1] Bernard O’Donoghue, Poetry: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 3.
[2] Percy Bysshe Shelley. A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays, 1821, Project Gutenberg (April 2004) accessed October 10 2024, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9097.
[3] W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, in The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977), 242. Auden’s phrase is one of the most disputed statements about poetry in twentieth-century criticism. For a concise summary of the debate, see John Lyon, ‘Disappearing Poetry: Auden, Yeats, Empson’, in The Oxford Hanbook of British and Irish War Poetry, ed. Tim Kendall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 279–85.
[4] James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1.