Peter Porter Quotes

Poetry is language in orbit.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects - things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language - either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.

It's not easy to define poetry.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.

A poem is bound by language, but a poetics is not.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

My work should be seen as poetry.

A good poem is an amazing thing: a perfectly distilled, articulate moment. It opens you up - sometimes slowly, like the blooming of a flower, and sometimes with a quick knife-slice.

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.

Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.

Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.