Good Poetry Quotes
Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot - if it is good poetry - look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom and complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.
Czeslaw Milosz
The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives every day what he cannot define. It is feeling that is first. What one cannot help but sense in good poetry is a sense of the whole language stirring toward richer possibilities than one could have foreseen.
John Ciardi
![Robert Morgan quote: "The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse..."](/pic/226096/600x316/quotation-robert-morgan-the-fact-that-something-is-in-a-rhymed-form-or-in.jpg)
![Alfred Douglas quote: "All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link,..."](/pic/192725/600x316/quotation-alfred-douglas-all-good-poetry-is-forged-slowly-and-patiently.jpg)
![Nikki Giovanni quote: "Poetry and music are very good friends. Like mommies and..."](/pic/212608/600x316/quotation-nikki-giovanni-poetry-and-music-are-very-good-friends-like.jpg)
Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.
Jorge Luis Borges
However, he wrote some verses on her, and very pretty they were.”
“And so ended his affection,” said Elizabeth impatiently. “There has been many a one, I fancy, overcome in the same way. I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!”
“I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love,” said Darcy.
“Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced...
Jane Austen
![Kenneth Koch quote: "As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems..."](/pic/59945/600x316/quotation-kenneth-koch-as-for-political-poetry-as-its-usually-defined.jpg)