light to see by

The poem…is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see—it is, rather, a light by which we may see—and what we see is life.

—Robert Penn Warren, Saturday Review (March 22, 1958)

invent it

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger. And from that need, from the relationships within ourselves and among ourselves as we went on living, and from every other expression of man’s nature, poetry would be—I cannot say invented or discovered—poetry would be derived.

—Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Wm. Morrow & Co., 1974)

step aside

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

—W. Somerset Maugham, Saturday Review, 20 July 1957.

continuing on

Poetry is about continuing poetry.

—Joanne Kyger, ABOUT NOW: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation, 1997, p. 631)

social antidote

For every lie we're told by advertisers and politicians, we need one poem to balance it.

—Jorie Graham, “The Cruelest (and Coolest) Month” (Newsweek, April 9, 2004)

living use

Art is not living. It is a use of living. The artist has the ability to take that living and use it in a certain way, and produce art.

—Audre Lorde, “My Words Will Be There,” I am your sister: collected and unpublished writings of Audre Lorde (Oxford Univ. Press, 2009)

body and soul

What the soul does for the body so does the poet for her people.

—Gabriela Mistral, inscription on her tomb. From Marjorie Agosin’s introduction to Gabriela Mistral: A Reader (White Pine Press, 1993), translated by Maria Giachetti.

time itself

Hegel said that art was a thing of the past. It pleases me to say: to the contrary, poetry is a question for the future, so much so that the future itself belongs to poetry, is poetry. Without poetry there will be no future. The time that would see poetry die will itself be just another death.

Poetry does not have a time: it is time.

—Adonis, "A language that exiles me," boundary 2, (Vol 26, No.1, Spring 1999) translated by Pierre Joris

without poets, without artists...

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

—Guillaume Apollinaire,"On Painting," 1913, The Cubist Painters (Univ. of California Press, 2004)

What's poetry for?

Poetry is all beauty that cannot be explained and needs no explanation.

—Juan Ramón Jiménez, The Complete Perfectionist, translated by Christopher Maurer