Because I value the gift, solace, and challenge of poetry, I have started collecting quotes that help illumine the process and purpose of poetry. I’ll add to the list as I find good ones, from both historical and contemporary sources. Here is what I have so far:
Poetry is:
“…the music of the soul.” ~Voltaire
“…the art of uniting pleasure with truth.” ~Samuel Johnson
“…the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself.” ~William Hazlitt
“…[that which] makes my body so cold no fire can warm me,” [and makes me} “feel as if the top of my head were taken off.” ~Emily Dickinson
“…not the assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.” ~T.S. Eliot
“…the breath and finer spirit of knowledge.” ~William Wordsworth
“The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in.” ~Dylan Thomas
“Make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.” ~Wendell Berry
“Through poetry, [we] can inquire about the world and [our] place in it…. It is a communal form of inquiry directed towards discovering universal truths.” ~Nayeli Riano
“Poetry is, to me, the art of putting the NOW into words.” ~Gary Haddis
“Poetry calls upon us to probe our deepest emotions and longings.” ~Sharon Olds
“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” ~Robert Frost
“People who pray, need to learn poetry.” ~Eugene Peterson
“To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.” ~Edgar Allen Poe
“A good poet tries to lead you into universal experience by leading you into a shot of concrete experience–one flower, one frog…That’s what it takes to pull you into the depth of everything.” ~Richard Rohr
“Poetry, like faith, can look at the back as well as the front of reason; it can survey reason all round.” ~Charles Williams
“Poetry, in capturing the moment, captures the soul.” ~Mary Harwell Sayler
“A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words. This may sound easy. It isn’t. A lot of people think or believe or know they feel—but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling—not knowing or believing or thinking.” ~E.E. Cummings
“In poetry the words are the body and the ‘theme’ or ‘content’ is the soul.” ~C.S. Lewis
“A poet is a man who is glad of something and tries to make other people glad of it, too.” ~George MacDonald (in his novel, At the Back of the North Wind)
“What draws us to poetry is its ability to connect with us by burying ideas beneath the mere words written. Subtext is the magic that keeps us coming back. But in order for the magic to work, the text above the subtext must always remain somewhat ambiguous.” ~Greg Boyd (in regard to biblical poetry)
“To me, that’s the gift of poetry—it shapes an endless conversation about the most important things in life. … Reading poems can help bring clarity and insight to emotions that can be confusing or contradictory.” ~Caroline Kennedy