More on Poetry & Poets

Now where were we? Oh yes, we were discussing how poetry should be easy to write. 

My last argument for its apparent ease of creation is that you find it everywhere...

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~Leonard Cohen 

The sad truth is this: There's nothing easy about writing poetry...

If the author had said "Let us put on appropriate galoshes," there could, of course, have been no poem. ~Author Unknown

It's a world unto itself...

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. ~Carl Sandburg
 
It requires the tossing about of impressive yet mysterious words such as abecedarian, acatalectic, clerihew, dactyl and trochee. This is but one reason why so many find themselves in awe of the poet. There are others...

Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science. ~Sigmund Freud

The poet doesn't see the world differently but he's more in tune with its shadows than are the rest of us. He feels the world deeply... 

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music...and then people crowd about the poet and say to him:  "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul." 
~Soren Kierkegaard

The fact we almost expect poets to experience a certain degree of suffering is perhaps why they're allowed a great deal of latitude...

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.  ~Thomas Hardy 

We expect to be moved by poetry, and even if we don't understand a certain poem, we know somewhere someone does and that person is certainly moved... 

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. ~Thomas Gray 

However, we also expect poetry to outlast us...

Browsing the dim back corner
Of a musty antique shop
Opened an old book of poetry
Angels flew out from the pages
I caught a whiff of a soul

The ink seemed fresh as today
Was that voices whispering
The tree of the paper still grows.

~Terri Guillemets 

And lastly, why this is true, I don't know. But, it is... 

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.  ~G.K. Chesterton