Chameleons feed on light and air:
Poets’ food is love and fame. Percy Bysshe Shelley, An Exhortation, 1820
Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong:
They learn in suffering what they teach in song. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Julian and Maddalo, 1818
You will see Coleridge – he who sits obscure,
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind,
Which, with its own internal lightning blind,
Flags wearily through darkness and despair –
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
A hooded eagle among blinking owls. Percy Bysshe Shelley, letter to Maria Gisborne 1820
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. ibid.
The most unfailing herald, companion and follower of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such periods as this, there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. ibid.
The vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into the crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language to another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower. ibid.
Shelley’s first long poem, Queen Mab, is a ferocious and sometimes magnificent diatribe against the social order. In Ireland he wrote and attempted to circulate his Address to the Irish People, in which he argued for an Association to campaign for Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform. When three revolutionary workers were executed after the Pentridge uprising in Nottinghamshire in 1817, Shelley wrote a furious pamphlet scornfully comparing their unnoticed deaths to the public hysteria about the death of a young princess. In the same year he wrote another pamphlet urging the sort of demands for parliamentary reform which appeared on Chartist banners 20 years later ...
He utterly refused to bend his opinions. He was resolutely revolutionary all his life – but his confidence ebbed and flowed according to the ebb and flow of popular movements and uprisings. After his move to Italy in 1818 his best revolutionary poetry, especially the Ode to Liberty and Hellas, were written in tune with the European revolts of the time – in Spain, Naples and in Greece. But when there was not much happening, especially when the news from England was all bad, he wrote more and more lyric poetry. His political passions were never forsaken, but they were often buried deep in lyrical metaphor.
But the anger burned furiously, never far beneath the surface. Every so often it erupted like the volcanoes he was always writing about. The most extraordinary example of this is his poem about the massacre at Peterloo – The Mask of Anarchy. The demonstration in August 1819 in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, was at that time the biggest trade union gathering ever organised in Britain. In spite of the Combination Acts and all the other government inspired measures to do them down, the trade unions were growing in strength and influence. The main speaker at the Manchester demonstration was Henry Hunt, a working class agitator. The huge crowd came with their families as though to a picnic. It was like a miners’ gala of modern times ...
When news of this day’s work reached Shelley in Italy he was literally speechless with rage. He plunged into the little attic room he used at that time as a study. In five days he never appeared for conversation or recreation. He wrote the 92 verses of The Mask of Anarchy, without any doubt at all the finest poem of political protest ever written in our language. It has been quoted again and again in protests ever since. The Chartists revelled in it, and reprinted it. Gandhi quoted it when agitating among the South African Indians in the early part of this century. More recently it was translated and chanted during the students’ uprising at Tiananmen Square, Beijing.
The most powerful element in the poem is Shelley’s anger. The horror of Peterloo had fanned the flames of the fury of his youth. Somehow he hung on to the discipline of rhyme and metre. The poem is in many ways the most carefully constructed thing he ever wrote. The parameters allowed by poetic licence in a long and complicated poem like Prometheus Unbound are very wide. In The Mask of Anarchy, Shelley confined himself to the rhythm of the popular ballads of the time. Paul Foot, article July/August 1992, ‘Poetry of Protest’
The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities ... If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry. Rachel Carson
The greatest philosophical poet that has ever lived – Dante. Kenneth Clark: Civilisation 3/13: Romance & Reality, BBC 1969
A gentle melancholy: gentle poetry was inspired by that mood. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 11/13: The Worship of Nature
Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world. A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry but to achieve clarity. George Oppen
We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections. Niels Bohr
Oh! many are the Poets that are sown
By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine;
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse. William Wordsworth, The Excursion, 1814
Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills;
And mighty Poets in their misery dead. William Wordsworth, Resolution and Independence 1820 ed
The Poet writes under the restriction only, namely, the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer or a natural philosopher, but as a Man. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity. William Wordsworth
Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science. ibid.
Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart. William Wordsworth, Scorn Not the Sonnet, 1827
Give me a thrill, says the reader,
Give me a kick;
I don’t care how you succeed, or
What subject you pick.
Choose something you know about
That’ll sound like real life:
Your childhood, your Dad pegging out,
How you sleep with your wife.
But that’s not sufficient, unless
You make me feel good –
Whatever you’re ‘trying to express’
Let it be understood
That ‘somehow’ God plaits up the threads,
Makes ‘all for the best’,
That we may lie quiet in our beds
And not be ‘depressed’.
For I call the tune in this racket:
I pay your screw,
Write reviews and the bull on the jacket –
So stop looking blue
And start serving up sensations
Before it’s too late;
Just please me for two generations –
You’ll be truly great. Philip Larkin, Fiction and the Reading Public
I am afraid the compulsion to write poems left me about seventy years ago, since when I have written virtually nothing. Naturally this is a disappointment, but I would sooner write no poems than bad poems. Philip Larkin, letter 11th August 1984
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words. Vladimir Nabokov
I wonder if there isn’t too much poetry taught in school nowadays. Rumpole of the Bailey s2e5: Rumpole and the Course of True Love, George Frobisher, ITV 1979
And scribbled lines like fallen hopes
On backs of tattered envelopes. Francis Hope, Instead of a Poet, 1965
Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life. Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism (second series 1888)
We have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete. ibid.
All a poet can do is warn. Wilfred Owen
Poetry, in the most comprehensive application of the term, I take to be the flower of any kind of experience, rooted in truth, and issuing forth into beauty. Leigh Hunt, The Story of Rimini, 1832