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Dr. Bordelon's Introduction to Poetry

Quotes on Poetry

This is a start: feel free to send yours in.

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can 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 poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?”
Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson

"Poetry is produced for purposes of comfort, as part of the consolatio philosophiae. It is undertaken as equipment for living, as a ritualistic way of arming us to confront perplexities and risks. It would protect us" (Burke 61).

Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Baton Rouge: Louisiana UP, 1941. Print.

“Poetry is life distilled”
Gwendolyn Brooks

"Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: 'You can’t deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.'”
Cesare Pavese The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1950

Poems "help us to live our lives by providing acute analogues to everyday experience, and by swinging a lantern ahead of us in the fog of our lives" (Parini 26)
Parini, Jay. "The Bog Poet." Rev. of Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. The Nation 4 January 1999: 25-28.

                                  It is difficult
to get the news from poems
                yet men die miserably every day
                                  for lack
of what is found there
William Carlos Williams "Of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"

"Being now resoved to be a poet, I saw everything with a new purpose; my sphere of attention was suddenly magnified; no kind of knowledge was to be overlooked."
"To a poet nothing can be useless. Whatever is beautiful, and whatever is dreadful, must be familiar to his imagination; he must be conversant with all that is awfully vast or elegantly little."
Samuel Johnson Rasselas

“The end of Poetry is to produce excitement in co-existence with an over-balance of pleasure”
William Wordsworth

“The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The poet is always our contemporary. Our being for the moment is centred and constricted, as in any violent shock of personal emotion."
Virginia Woolf "How Should One Read a Book?"

"Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response)."
Virginia Woolf

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