Most people ignore most poetry

because

most poetry ignores most people.

Adrian Mitchell

It's easier to quote poets than to read them.

Allison Barrows, Preteena, 09-30-06

There exist only three beings worthy¹ of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867), Mon Coeur Mis a Nu, XXII

The freedom of poetic² license³.

Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC), Pro⁴ Publio Sestio

A poem is no place for an idea.

Edgar Watson Howe (1853 - 1937), Country Town Sayings, 1911

My poems are hymns⁵ of praise to the glory of life.

Edith Sitwell (1887 - 1964), "Some notes on my poetry" Collected Poems, 1957

Poetry is the deification of reality.

Edith Sitwell (1887 - 1964), Life magazine, 01-04-63

All slang is a metaphor⁶, and all metaphor is poetry.

G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936), Defendant⁷ (1901)

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but all are overwhelmed in eternal night, unwept, unknown, because they lack a sacred poet.

Horace (65 BC - 8 BC), Odes

It was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.

Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Persuasion⁸, 1818

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.

Jean Cocteau (1889 - 1963)

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence⁹ is enough suffering for anyone.

John Ciardi (1916 - 1986)

Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.

John Keats (1795 - 1821)

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance¹⁰.

M. C. Richards

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

Paul Dirac (1902 - 1984)

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

Paul Valery (1871 - 1945)

Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.

Robert Graves (1895 - 1985)

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.

Robert Heinlein (1907 - 1988), Time Enough for Love, 1978

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

Samuel McChord Crothers

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately¹¹, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834)

A poet's hope: to be,

like some valley cheese,

local, but prized elsewhere.

W. H. Auden (1907 - 1973), Collected Poems

The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.

Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)