**quotes From Poets On Poetry Poem by RAJ NANDY

** QUOTES FROM POETS ON
POETRY

The great Shakespeare in his ‘A Midsummer
Night’s Dream’,
Speaks of poetry as ‘forms of things unknown,
The poet’s pen turns them to shape,
And gives to airy nothing a local habitation
and a name’!
John Ashbery had always felt, that ‘poetry
all the time goes on in his head’, -
And ‘occasionally he snips off a length’!
For Coleridge, ‘prose is arrangement of words
in their best order’,
But ‘poetry is the best words in their best order’!
For Paul Engle, poetry is ‘ordinary language
raised to the N-th power’,
While for William Wordsworth it is a continuous
shower, -
And ‘a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,
Of emotions recollected in tranquility’, - is fairly
healing!
Shelley in his ‘Defense of Poetry’ sincerely felt,
That ‘poetry lifts the veil, from the hidden beauty
of the world’,
Making ‘the familiar objects be as if they were
not familiar’!
While Carl Sandburg speaks of poetry as, -
‘The journal of a sea animal living on land,
Wanting to fly in the air’, - as high as it possibly
can!
Robert Graves declared rather candidly, -
That ‘if there’s no money in poetry’, one need
not feel sorry,
Since there is ‘neither any poetry in money’!
I conclude with Robert Frost, who always felt,
That writing a ‘poem is discovering as he
progressed’,
Since for him, ‘poetry never had a pre-meditated
end’!
-Raj Nandy
New Delhi
26 Feb 09
(** The words of our famous poets/authors, have
been placed in ‘inverted commas’.)