Famous Quotes on the Art of Poetry

[shortstoryfan]

I have been thinking a lot lately about those huge pretty much universally accepted ideas on poetry that float around all the time. Some of them are actual quotes--like the final line of Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica"--but others may not have such a distinctly traceable origin.

Please share all the ones you have heard!

[Silas Thorne]

There are many important quotes on poetry. I suspect we'll repeat famous ones here often, but here's a few to start:

'All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.'
William Wordsworth

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

'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. '
Percy Byshe Shelley

'A poem is never finished, only abandoned.'
Paul Valery

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.'
P.B. Shelley

[Silas Thorne]

I don't think there are 'universally accepted ideas' on poetry though.

[cafolini]

As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree,' probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on. ~ Woody Allen

[cafolini]

I don't think there are 'universally accepted ideas' on poetry though.


I agree.:nod:

[shortstoryfan]

Yeah, I agree that there isn't. But the way the public, the majority of people perceive poetry? I do kind of think they have very similar views of what poetry is or should be.

And I have never heard any of those quotes Silas--except, perhaps the Auden quote, because I think I read something where he was talking about what made someone a poet.