Poetry Quotes

An extra yawn one morning in the springtime, an extra snooze one night in the autumn is all that we ask in return for dazzling gifts. We borrow an hour one night in April; we pay it back with golden interest five months later.

The best poets, after all, exhibit only a tame and civil side of nature. They have not seen the west side of any mountain.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination. That is all that can save poetry from sing-song, all that can save prose from itself.

Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought.

O brave poets, keep back nothing; Nor mix falsehood with the whole! Look up Godward! speak the truth in Worthy song from earnest soul! Hold, in high poetic duty, Truest Truth the fairest Beauty.

The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.

... the natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores.

Everybody is writing, writing, writing - worst of all, writing poetry. It'd be better if the whole tribe of the scribblers - every damned one of us - were sent off somewhere with tool chests to do some honest work.

And Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Ben, Whose fire-hearts sowed our furrows when The world was worthy of such men.

Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.

A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.

A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

Poets should be law-givers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead the civil code, and the day's work.

Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.

Peitaho Heavy rains fall on Yuyen, the northland kingdom of swallows. White pages of rain envelop the sky, and fishing boats off the Island of the Emperor Chin disappear on the ocean. Which way have they gone? More than a thousand years ago the mighty emperor Tsao Tsao cracked his whip and drove his army against the Tartars. He left us a poem: "Let us move east to the Stone Mountains." Today we still shiver in the autumn gale, in desolate winds, yet another man is in the world.

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.

The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.

I have my books And my poetry to protect me; I am shielded in my armor, Hiding in my room, safe within my womb. I touch no one and no one touches me. I am a rock, I am an island.

See I'm a poet to some, a regular modern day Shakespeare.

I've given offense by saying I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.

My life has been the poem I would have writ,But I could not both live and utter it.

Poetry gave me back my voice.

There is a property in the horizon which no man has, but he whose eyes can integrate all the parts,--that is, the poet.

Requiescat Tread lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow. All her bright golden hair Tarnished with rust, She that was young and fair Fallen to dust. Lily-like, white as snow, She hardly knew She was a woman, so Sweetly she grew. Coffin-board, heavy stone, Lie on her breast, I vex my heart alone She is at rest. Peace, Peace, she cannot hear Lyre or sonnet, All my life’s buried here, Heap earth upon it.

Dreams are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on earth in the night season, and melt away in the first beam of the sun, which lights grim care and stern reality on their daily pilgrimage through the world.

Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.

Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you're going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power.

I had read a Tale of Two Cities and found it up to my standards as a romantic novel. She opened the first page and I heard poetry for the first time in my life...her voice slid in and curved down trough and over the words. She was nearly singing.

Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

I have my books and my poetry to protect me

Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.

Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.

Although the poet has as wide a choice of subjects as the painter, his creations fail to afford as much satisfaction to mankind as do paintings... if the poet serves the understanding by way of the ear, the painter does so by the eye, which is the nobler sense.

Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.

Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals.

Return to Shaoshan I regret the passing, the dying, of the vague dream: my native orchards thirty-two years ago. Yet red banners roused the serfs, who seized three-pronged lances when the warlords raised whips in their black hands. We were brave and sacrifice was easy and we asked the sun, the moon, to alter the sky. Now I see a thousand waves of beans and rice and am happy. In the evening haze heroes are coming home.

There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, 'Truth is the daughter of Time.'

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

I know as well as thee that I am no poet bornIt is a trade, I never learnt nor indeed could learnIf I make verses-'tis in spiteOf nature and my stars I write.

Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music.

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit ~ not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviæ from their graves ... You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into.

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

When power corrupts, poetry cleanses

I always feel that whatever isn't necessary shouldn't be in a poem.

Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you/ That you may be my poem/ I whisper with my lips close to your ear/ I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

A translation in verse . . . seems to me something absurd, impossible.

At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.

The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

I read poetry to save time.

What a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.