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	on writing or poetry:



Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.... Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art ...
    -Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), U.S. philosopher. The Human Condition, ch.  23 (1958)



THE FUTURE of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry.
    -Matthew Arnold, The Study of Poetry



Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disembodiment of the spiritual; Poetry is all passionate and feeling and animates the inanimate; Metaphysics are most perfect when concerned with universals; Poetry, when most concerned with particulars.
    -Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)



All poets are mad.
    -Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy



Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.
    -Samuel Butler



I have nothing to say,
I am saying it, 
and that is poetry.
	-John Cage



A poem is a machine for making choices.
    -John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean



In poetry, in which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style; namely: its untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning.
    -Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ch. 22



Poetry is asking the more beautiful question.
    -ee cummings



Poetry is important. No less than science, it seeks a hold upon reality, and the closeness of its approach is the test of its success.
    -Babette Deutsch (1895-1982), U.S. poet. This Modern Poetry, Foreword (1935)



"Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day, or Warren's blackin' or Rowland's oil, or some o' them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy."
    -Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Tony Weller in The Pickwick Papers, ch. 33, p. 452 (1837).



Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
    -Denis Diderot (1713-1784) On Dramatic Poetry (1758).



Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful ...  like a bouillon cube: You carry it around and then it nourishes you when you need it.
	-Rita Dove



If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is a hangover." 
	-Anselm Dovetonsils



The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.

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.

[Poetry] may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
    -T.S. Eliot



Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
    -Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)



Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.
    -Christopher Fry (1907)


Poetry presents indivisible wholes of human consciousness, modified and ordered by the stringent requirements of form. Prose, aiming at a definite and concrete goal, generally suppresses everything inessential to its purpose; poetry, existing only to exhibit itself as an aesthetic object, aims only at completeness and perfection of form.
    -Richard Harter Fogle, U.S. critic, educator.



Poetry is what is lost in translation.
    -Robert Frost



Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement ... says heaven and earth in one word ... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.
    -Christopher Fry (b. 1907)



Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quite well developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean.
    -Northrop Frye (1912-1991)



Sometimes only my brain can talk, and sometimes only my mouth can talk.
    -Laura Gerald



Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
	-Allen Ginsberg



Reach the dumb 
fool the masses
	-Graffiti on Washington Avenue bridge



Prose talks and poetry sings.

Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.

What raises great poetry above all else--it is the entire person and also the entire world.

The spirit of poetry combines the profundity of the philosopher and the child's delight in bright pictures.

At certain times, men regard poetry merely as a bright flame, but to women it was, and always will be, a warm fire.

Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?

Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.
    -Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872)



Poetry at its best is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.
    -Jim Harrison (1937-) from "Poetry as Survival" (collected in Just Before Dark)


Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
    -William Hazlitt (1778-1830), British essayist. Lectures on the English Poets, .On Poetry in General,. (1818).



Poetry, and Picture, are Arts of a like nature; and both are busie about imitation. It was excellently said of Plutarch, Poetry was a speaking Picture, and Picture a mute Poesie. For they both invent, faine, and devise many things, and accommodate all they invent to the use, and service of nature. Yet of the two, the Pen is more noble, than the Pencill. For that can speake to the Understanding; the other, but to the Sense.
    -Ben Jonson (1573-1637), British playwright, poet. Timber, or Discoveries (1640)



Men do not live by truth alone; they also need lies: those that they invent freely, not those that are imposed on them; those that appear as they are, not smuggled in beneath the clothes of history.  Fiction enriches their existence, completes them and, fleetingly, compensates them for this tragic condition which is our lot: always to desire and dream more than we can actually achieve.
    -Mario Vargas Llosa



Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
    -Audre Lorde (1934-1992)



Poetry is the heaven of the working reason. Poetry is a divination of the spiritual in the things of sense.which expresses itself in the things of sense, and in a delight of sense. Metaphysics also pursues a spiritual prey, but metaphysics is engaged in abstract knowledge, while poetry quickens art. Metaphysics snatches at the spiritual in an idea, by the most abstract intellection; poetry reaches it in the flesh, by the very point of the sense sharpened through intelligence. Metaphysics enjoys its possession only in the retreats of the eternal regions, while poetry finds its own at every crossroad in the wanderings of the contingent and the singular. The more real the reality, the superreal (I would not give up this word to the Surrealists), the superreal which both seek, metaphysics must attain in the nature of things, while it suffices to poetry to touch it in any sign whatsoever. Metaphysics gives chase to essences and definitions, poetry to any flash of existence glittering by the way, and any reflection of an invisible order.
    -Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), French philosopher



We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to. 
    -W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965) 



Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you'€™ve lost the whole thing.
    -W.S. Merwin (b. 1928), U.S. poet. Interview. "A Poet of Their Own,"€� The New York Times Magazine (February 19, 1995).



Poetry and eloquence are both alike expression or utterance of feeling. But if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet.s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet.s mind. Eloquence is feeling pouring itself to other minds, courting their sympathy, or endeavoring to influence their belief or to move them to passion or to action.
    -John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), British philosopher. .Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,. vol. 1, Dissertations and Discussions (1859).



Poetry and the stock market have a lot in common . . . They are both based on rules that the successful never obey.
    -Arthur Miller in "Resurrection Blues"



I hate that rule that says write about what you know, it leads to too many British novels about marriages going slightly wrong. Write about what you don't know, just act as though you do.  
    -Jeff Noon (http://www.sensei.co.uk/zeitgeist/noon.html)



I don't believe in rhythm, assonance, [any] of that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star.'
	-Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)



The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns ... instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
	-George Orwell



Poetry is not truth:
it is the resurrection of presences.

---

At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of joy and the vertigo of death  [in Proem, or Proema]
	-Octavio Paz



In the beginnings of our research into narrative we ran up against the inescapable fact that there exists no standard deffinition of narrative in the sense that writers seem to use the word.
    __Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine__



Poetry is creative expression; poetry is constructive expression. That, in a sentence, is the real distinction.... In poetry the words are born or re-born in the act of thinking. The words are, in Bergsonian phraseology, a becoming; they develop in the mind pari passu with the development of the thought. There is no time interval between the words and the thought. The thought is the word and the word is the thought, and both the thought and the word are Poetry. "Constructive" implies ready-made materials; words stacked round the builder, ready for use. Prose is a structure of ready-made words. Its "creative" function is confined to plan and elevation--functions these, too, of Poetry, but in Poetry subsidiary to the creative function.
    -Sir Herbert Read (1893-1968), British critic, poet.



poetry does not lack an audience due to a lack of good poets (although poetry, like opera and stand-up, must be sublime in order to avoid being awful), but due to competition. it used to be the only game on the block. now it has to vie with movies and novels and videogames for attention. 
    -"The Review" -found on an out-of-date geocities rant



Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.... A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually--that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too--but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.
    -Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), U.S. poet. The Life of Poetry, ch. 1 (1949).



I write when I can't not write.
    -Kathee Runo



Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
    -Carl Sandburg



Poetry can be criticized only through poetry. A critique which itself is not a work of art, either in content as representation of the necessary impression in the process of creation, or through its beautiful form and in its liberal tone in the spirit of the old Roman satire, has no right of citizenship in the realm of art.

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.

The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?
    -Friedrich Von Schlegel (1772-1829), German philosopher.



Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.

A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men.

A story of particular facts is a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which it distorts.
    -Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)



Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing
with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring
with replacing the noun. It is doing that always
doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that.
Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and
pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is
what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no
matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a
great many kinds of poetry.
    -Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), "Poetry and Grammar," Lectures in America, Random House (1935).



Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.
    -Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)



Although we live by strife,
We're always sorry to begin it,
For what, we ask, is life
Without a touch of Poetry in it?

Hail, Poetry, thou heav'n-born maid!
Thou gildest e'en the pirate's trade.
Hail, flowing fount of sentiment!
All hail, all hail, divine emollient!
	-Gilbert & Sullivan



Some atrocity is sure to pop up,
Buttered with enthusiasm
On both sides.
No, write it now
While your head is empty
Like a belly; you'll be glad
You started off at nothing
So that
Something could arise.
    -Randal VanderMey, Always Write a Poem Like This



Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tired. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will near be new again. It is only the vision that can be new; but that is enough.
    -Eudora Welty



There is more music to be found in poetry and in the quiet contemplation of nature, than in studying music itself.
    -john Williams, composer



Poets, like whores, are only hated by each other.
    -William Wycherley, The Country Wife 




	other quotes

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
    -Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.


Understanding is hard. the less you know of someone the more likely you are to 
think they act deliberately. The better you know them the more you realize that 
they are as deeply mired in old habits as you are. It follows, then that if you 
think someone acted deliberately, maybe you don't understand the situation.
    -Someone's Father
     http://www.livejournal.com/users/rosencrantz319/75929.html



Time is the best teacher. Unfortunately, it kills all its pupils. 
    -Hector-Louis Berlioz



If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe.
    -Abraham Lincoln



She believed in nothing. Only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.
    -Jean-Paul Sartre



Sobriety is a side effect caused by not enough alcohol in your system.
    -anon



You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something,
build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
    -Buckminster Fuller



The human body is a veritable festival of fluids.
    -Matt Wilson



Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
    -anon



There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden 
shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such 
things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are 
resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get 
the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.
    -Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsenetomo (1700s)



For every problem, there exists a simple and elegant solution which
is absolutely wrong.
    -J. Wagoner, U.C.B. Mathematics



Only the shallow know themselves. 
    -Oscar Wilde



Yes, you can quote me. Fuck binary! Fuck it!! Fuck it like bunnies!!
    -Maria Brumm



The difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no
difference between theory and practice, while in practice, there is.
    -Unknown



Information can exist outside the human brain. In the forms of codex systems,
genetic symbols, and transitory energy networks, information is routinely
stored and processed in ways that do not involve the human brain. From this
it becomes apparent that not only are we are swimming in a sea of information
but we are actually and quite literally made of information in the same way
that we are made of matter and energy.
    -joseph r. shuster



Without 'chaos', no knowledge. Without a frequent dismissal of reason, no
progress.
    -Paul Feyerabend, __Against Method__



"in the bleak midwinter frosty wind made moan,
earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.
snow had fallen snow on snow, snow on snow.
in the bleak midwinter, long long ago."
    -Christina Rosetti


Producing machines capable of artificial thought was easy. Producing a
machine capable of intelligence has proven elusive because there just
isn't anything on which to model it. (Judge Crater)

It's easier to scratch one's ass than one's heart. (St Augustine)
    --Found on the flightless hummingbird page: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rmutt/HomePage.html



There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a
miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
    -Albert Einstein (1879-1955)



The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he
didn't exist.
    -The Usual Suspects



...depending on the demons that are at our door.
    -Ani DiFranco



All that you have is your soul.
    -Tracy Chapman



What's the use of falling in love?
    -Bjork



When forming our outlook on any subject, we should be sampling sensible
ideas from different groups, diferent time periods, different experiences,
and fusing them into a new outlook, a new whole-- something distinct from
the sum of it's parts-- something with a soul all of it's own.
    -William Upski Wimsat, Bomb the Suburbs



And Polo said: The inferno of the living is not something that will be;
if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live
every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape
suffering it. The fist is easy for many: accept the inferno and become
such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and
demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize
who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not the inferno, then make
them endure, give them space.
    -Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities



It's a very tricky thing because you don't want to get too close and yet
you have to get a little close or it's no fun.
    - STEVE MARTIN, on relationships. 



Then, from His place of ambush, God leapt out.
    -Rainer Maria Rilke, poem _Imaginary Career_



If I don't laugh at myself, who will?
    -Cathy Anderson



I don't really like it when people take me seriously, because most of the
time I'm just talking out my ass.  
    -John Grider



You move with the eloquence of a fiery wall of disintegrating fuselage.

The spark of intelligence in your blinking eyes is not unlike the glow
from the teeth of an electrocuted axe-murderess. 

Your eyes are like spheres of glue filled with shimmering worms. 
    -Surealist Compliment Generator



Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back into the same
box.
    -Italian Proverb



Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and
he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
    -StarChaser (?)



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