Ars Poetica Quotes

“A poet […] may talk nonsense, but it will probably be interesting nonsense.”
― W.H. Auden

“I have nothing but a book,
Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.”
― W.B. Yeats

“Ce n'était ni le Diable ni le bon Dieu, c'était Arthur Rimbaud, c'est-à-dire un très grand poète.”
― Paul Verlaine

“My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,
With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes
of worlds.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“Now What?" Kerensky said. "We wait," Dahl said. "For how long?" Kerensky said, " As long as dramatically appropriate," Dahl said.”
― John Scalzi, Redshirts

“I cast my heart into my rhymes,
That you, in the dim coming times,
May know how my heart went with them”
― W.B. Yeats

“Far as we aim our signs to reach,
Far as we often make them reach,
Across the soul-from-soul abyss,
There is an aeon-limit set
Beyond which they are doomed to miss.
Two souls may be too widely met.
That sad-with-distance river beach
With mortal longing may beseech;
It cannot speak as far as this.”
― Robert Frost

“Whatever else it may or may not be, I want every poem I write to be a hymn in praise of the English language.”
― W.H. Auden

“Life is fleeting and full of sorrow and no words can prevent the brave and the beautiful from dying or annihilate a grief. What poetry can do is transform the real world into an imaginary one which is godlike in its permanence and beauty, providing a picture of life which is worthy of imitation as far as it is possible.”
― W.H. Auden

“My name on the title-page seems a pseudonym for someone else, someone talented but near the border of sanity...”
― W.H. Auden

“Fundamental and flagrant contradictions rarely occur in second-rate writers; in the work of the great authors, they lead into the very center of their work.”
― Hannah Arendt

“The strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings

“Whatever may have been the case in years gone by, the true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science, and to common lives, endowing them with the glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to every real thing, and to real things only. Without that ultimate vivification—which the poet or other artist alone can give—reality would seem incomplete, and science, democracy, and life itself, finally in vain.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings

“Listen! I will be honest with you,
I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes”
― Walt Whitman

“...an actualized poem requires the actualization, or radical transformation, of the poet - that a poem is the discovery and enactment of an emotional and psychological investigation into the vexed interiority of a speaker, that the interior is indeed political - and that every poem, every time, in some miraculous way, must be an argument about the making of poetry itself.”
― Paul Tran, All the Flowers Kneeling

“not enough space in a poem
to read all the names
of the dead”
― Remi Kanazi, Before the Next Bomb Drops: Rising Up from Brooklyn to Palestine

“At some point, Tracy sent me the demos for the next Static Saints album. I was knocked out, and soon became fixated on the song "Useful and Beautiful." It would likely be heard as an ode to sexual debasement, but I think it's also an invitation to root your life and your art in utility and beauty. I found myself returning endlessly to this question: How can we make Tracy's memoir more useful and more beautiful. I love that her song enacts what it extols. It reminds us that we can revel in sexual pleasure and perversity ("I've got uses, I've got bruises") while also opening up to become more expansive, more useful, and more beautiful ("Oh let me be a crashing wave. Oh let me be a secret cave.").”
― Hazel Jane Plante, Any Other City