howtowritepoetry
How to Write Poetry: Principia poetica for practitioners of the art
Today dear friends I will sing beautifully and make you happy.
— Sappho
The objects the imitator represents are actions.
— Aristotle
Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.
— Keats
A big book is a big bore.
— Callimachus
Of the many definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best: "memorable speech."
— W. H. Auden
Don't pay any attention to book prizes! Never. To none. Not
even the Nobel. They are a snare. — Vincent Miller
Literature is language charged with meaning.
— Ezra Pound
A man can learn more about poetry by really knowing and
examining a few of the best poems than by meandering about among
a great many.
— Ezra Pound
The poem which is absolutely original is absolutely bad
— T. S. Eliot
Miles Davis (after a gig): Man, why do you play so long?
John Coltrane: I had to play that long, to get it all in.
Les grands littérateurs n’ont jamais fait qu’une seule œuvre.
— Proust
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.
— T. S. Eliot
True wit is Nature to advantage dress'd,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.
— Pope
Silence can be complex too,
but you do not get far
with silence.
— William Carlos Williams
Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to
keep watch over my thoughts, because if a line of poetry strays
into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to
act.
— A. E. Housman
For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
— T. S. Eliot
No data without experiment.
— Sophocles, tr. Ezra Pound
Say what you will in two
Words and get through.
Long, frilly
Palaver is silly.
— Marie-Francoise-Catherine de Beauveau, tr. Ezra Pound
Interviewer: Doesn't it embarrass you to see Bobby trying to
learn how to play slide on stage? Jerry Garcia: Um, yeah.
But the point is, it doesn't embarrass him.
Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day ...
— Allen Ginsberg
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.
— Shelley
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
— William Carlos Williams
… that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world.
— Shelly
For years on years I have struggled with ink and hammer, O my
tortured heart, to make you an embroidery of fire and gold, an
orangetree hyancinth, a blossoming quince to console you ...
— Nikos Gatsos