10 Quotations Pertaining to Poetry

Sam tagged me for a list of 10 poetry quotations which are cited below. Thanks Sam. I enjoyed rooting out some favourites. : )


1)
I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
(Seamus Heaney)

2)Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric, out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. (W.B. Yeats)

3)Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. (Carl Sandburg)

4)
For me, a good poem is a gust of wind in the face, ruffling the hair.
It's a stone in the shoe,
a laugh in church,
a lie in the confessional,
a fart in a perfume shop,
a pig that flies,
a small glass of urine shining on the breakfast tables of the idle rich.
It's the stone in David's sling,
the thing we don't dare say in prose, or don't know how to say in prose.
It's the hidden part of the iceberg,
the sneer or the grin on the face of death-in-life,
the twisted thought that helps straighten the crooked road of this world.
Poetry is a permanent fighting back against the hopeless odds of life itself, a simple or complicated declaration that, for the moment, one is.

(http://www.virtualwriter.net/poetry/poetryexercises.php?action=3&id=12)

5)Tolstoy once remarked that what we look for in a work of art is the revelation of the artist's soul, a glimpse of God, you can't act that. (Arthur Miller)

6)All poets have a child inside (Brian Keenan on Pablo Neruda)

7)There is so little room, so little time! The poet becomes an expert packer of suitcases:
the apparition of these faces in a crowd;
petals on a wet, black bough.
There it is: the beginning and the end in one breath. (Sylvia Plath)

8)I think 20th century poetry will move against poppycock, it will be harder and saner,it will be 'nearer the bone' it will be as much like granite as it can be, it's force will lie in its truth, its interpretative power. (Ezra Pound)

9) A poet is never one of the people. A poet is detached, remote and the life of small town dances and talk about football would not be for him.(Patrick Kavanagh)

10)One reads poetry with one's nerves (Wallace Stevens)