Poetry Quotes

For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary.

Whatever the poets pretend, it is plain they give immortality to none but themselves; it is Homer and Virgil we reverence and admire, not Achilles or Aeneas. With historians it is quite the contrary; our thoughts are taken up with the actions, persons, and events we read, and we little regard the authors.

I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love.

Who are you, a hundred years from today, reading my poetry with curiosity?

Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.

Do you know, Considering the market, there are more Poems produced than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.

Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.

Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.

Is it thy will that I should wax and wane,Barter my cloth of gold for hodden grey,And at thy pleasure weave that web of painWhose brightest threads are each a wasted day?

To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

Ay, Much is the force of heaven-bred poesy.

I have long admired Ron Whitehead. He is crazy as nine loons, and his poetry is a dazzling mix of folk wisdom and pure mathematics

I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.

In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.

Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.

Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.

At bottom, no real object is unpoetical, if the poet knows how to use it properly.

If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.

Poetry is a reaching out forward expression, an effort to find fulfillment

Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades!Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids!O, might I vole to some umbrageous clump,--Depart,--be off,--excede,--evade,--erump!

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.

And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.

For poetry, he's past his prime,He takes an hour to find a rhyme;His fire is out, his wit decayed,His fancy sunk, his muse a jade.I'd have him throw away his pen,But there's no talking to some men.

Some poems are for holidays only. They are polished and sweet, but it is the sweetness of sugar, and not such as toil gives to sour bread. The breath with which the poet utters his verse must be that by which he lives.

The experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.

Men of science, osteologists And surgeons, beat some poets, in respect For nature,-count nought common or unclean, Spend raptures upon perfect specimens Of indurated veins, distorted joints, Or beautiful new cases of curved spine; While we, we are shocked at nature's falling off, We dare to shrink back from her warts and blains.

When we come down into the distant village, visible from the mountain-top, the nobler inhabitants with whom we peopled it have departed, and left only vermin in its desolate streets. It is the imagination of poets which puts those brave speeches into the mouths of their heroes.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.

Swlmmlng After swallowing some water at Changsha I taste a Wuchang fish in the surf and swim across the Yangtze River that winds ten thousand li. I see the entire Chu sky. Wind batters me, waves hit me-I don't care. Better than walking lazily in the patio. Today I have a lot of time. Here on the river the Master said "Dying-dying into the past-is like a river flowing."

By eloquence I understand those appeals to our moral perceptions that produce emotion as soon as they are uttered. This is the very enthusiasm that is the parent of poetry. Let the same man go to his closet and clothe in numbers conceptions full of the same fire and spirit, and they will be poetry.

Purple lilies Dante blew To a larger bubble with his prophet breath.

Yet, do thy worst, old Time; despite thy wrong,My love shall in my verse ever live young.

It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history.

Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions." "I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.

"Fair, kind, and true" is all my argument,"Fair, kind, and true" varying to other words;And in this change is my invention spent,Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.

Poetry is related to philosophy as experience is related to empirical science. Experience makes us acquainted with the phenomenon in the particular and by means of examples, science embraces the whole of phenomena by means of general conceptions. So poetry seeks to make us acquainted with the Platonic Ideas through the particular and by means of examples. Philosophy aims at teaching, as a whole and in general, the inner nature of things which expresses itself in these. One sees even here that poetry bears more the character of youth, philosophy that of old age.

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary.

The three ingredients of poetry: the mystery of the universe, spiritual curiosity, the energy of language.

It is vain for the sober man to knock at poesy's door.

I end not far from my going forth By picking the faded blue Of the last remaining aster flower To carry again to you.

For the poet is a light winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer with him. When he has not attained this state he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles.

Every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew.

And of poetry, the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavours after the unattainable.

The freedom of poetic license.

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.

I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once moreonly the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,--those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.

If I could write the beauty of your eyes And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, 'This poet lies; Such heavenly touches ne'er touch'd earthly faces.'

Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards, it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms; but first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.

In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.