Box -- a digital artwork (1999) by Eoin Dunford
My favourite poets are Samuel Beckett, Patrick Kavanagh, Andrew Marvell and Dylan Thomas. Here are some quotes about poetry by far better poets than me.
*
"A poem on a slight subject requires the greatest care to make it considerable enough to be read."
--Alexander Pope
"The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired that at periods when, from the excess of the calculating principle, the accumulation of materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature."
--Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Poets are the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present."
--Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind."
--Percy Bysshe Shelley
"The poet is dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love."
--Alfred Tennyson
"With one poor poet's scroll, freedom can shake the world."
--Alfred Tennyson
"I hold that the mission of poetry is to record impressions, not convictions."
--Thomas Hardy
"The business of the poet and novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things."
--Thomas Hardy
"I hold a beast, an angel, a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression."
--Dylan Thomas
"Poetry, recording the stripping of the individual darkness, must inevitably cast light upon what has been hidden for too long, and, by so doing, make clean the naked exposure."
--Dylan Thomas
"My poetry is, or should be, useful to me for one reason: it is the record of my individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light... My poetry is, or should be, useful to others for its individual recording of that same struggle."
--Dylan Thomas
"A poet is a poet for such a very tiny bit of his life; for the rest, he is a human being, one of whose responsibilities is to know and feel, as much as he can, all that is moving around and within him, so that his poetry, when he comes to write it, can be his attempt at the expression of the summit of man's experience on this very peculiar and, in 1946, this apparently hell-bent earth."
--Dylan Thomas
"Poetry is the voice of the Solitary Spirit; prose the language of the sociable-minded."
--W.B. Yeats
"Poetry is not literature; poetry is the breath of young life; and the cry of elemental beings. Literature is a cold ghost wind blowing through death's dark chapel."
--Patrick Kavanagh
"A poet is never one of the people. He is detached, remote, and the life of small-time dances and talk about football would not be for him."
--Patrick Kavanagh
"Poetry is honesty."
--Patrick Kavanagh
"In every poet there is something of Christ writing the sins of the people in the dust."
--Patrick Kavanagh
"The note of the poetic mind is a moral one, and it is this moral quality which the world cannot stand, for it is a constant reproach to inferior men."
--Patrick Kavanagh
"Far from the poet being a peasant... he is the last word in sophistication. The keynote of the poetic mind is subtlety."
--Patrick Kavanagh
"My argument has been that literature is not the activity of wild bohemianism, that it is part of a religious mind; that, in fact, it is religion."
--Patrick Kavanagh
*
"A poem on a slight subject requires the greatest care to make it considerable enough to be read."
--Alexander Pope
"The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired that at periods when, from the excess of the calculating principle, the accumulation of materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature."
--Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Poets are the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present."
--Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind."
--Percy Bysshe Shelley
"The poet is dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love."
--Alfred Tennyson
"With one poor poet's scroll, freedom can shake the world."
--Alfred Tennyson
"I hold that the mission of poetry is to record impressions, not convictions."
--Thomas Hardy
"The business of the poet and novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things."
--Thomas Hardy
"I hold a beast, an angel, a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression."
--Dylan Thomas
"Poetry, recording the stripping of the individual darkness, must inevitably cast light upon what has been hidden for too long, and, by so doing, make clean the naked exposure."
--Dylan Thomas
"My poetry is, or should be, useful to me for one reason: it is the record of my individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light... My poetry is, or should be, useful to others for its individual recording of that same struggle."
--Dylan Thomas
"A poet is a poet for such a very tiny bit of his life; for the rest, he is a human being, one of whose responsibilities is to know and feel, as much as he can, all that is moving around and within him, so that his poetry, when he comes to write it, can be his attempt at the expression of the summit of man's experience on this very peculiar and, in 1946, this apparently hell-bent earth."
--Dylan Thomas
"Poetry is the voice of the Solitary Spirit; prose the language of the sociable-minded."
--W.B. Yeats
"Poetry is not literature; poetry is the breath of young life; and the cry of elemental beings. Literature is a cold ghost wind blowing through death's dark chapel."
--Patrick Kavanagh
"A poet is never one of the people. He is detached, remote, and the life of small-time dances and talk about football would not be for him."
--Patrick Kavanagh
"Poetry is honesty."
--Patrick Kavanagh
"In every poet there is something of Christ writing the sins of the people in the dust."
--Patrick Kavanagh
"The note of the poetic mind is a moral one, and it is this moral quality which the world cannot stand, for it is a constant reproach to inferior men."
--Patrick Kavanagh
"Far from the poet being a peasant... he is the last word in sophistication. The keynote of the poetic mind is subtlety."
--Patrick Kavanagh
"My argument has been that literature is not the activity of wild bohemianism, that it is part of a religious mind; that, in fact, it is religion."
--Patrick Kavanagh
