Poetry Quotes

“in black ink my love may still shine bright.”

“Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it.”

“After you have pumped your brains for thoughts and verses, there is a better poetry hinted in whistling a tune on your walk.”

“This is how it always is when I finish a poem. A great silence overcomes me and I wonder why I ever thought to use language.”

“Love is the reality, and poetry is the drum.”

“The meaning of poetry has no sureness of direction; is like the sling, it is not under control.”

“Listen to presences inside poems.”

“Daughter of heaven and earth, coy Spring,With sudden passion languishing,Teaching barren moors to smile,Painting pictures mile on mile,Holds a cup of cowslip wreathsWhence a smokeless incense breathes.”

“The sign and credentials of the poet are that he announces that which no man foretold”

“A lady with whom I was riding in the forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspend their deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward; a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet.”

“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.”

“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 true philosopher and the true poet are one,and a beauty, which is truth,and a truth, which is beauty,is the aim of both.”

“When a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him.”

“For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem, - a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”

“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.”

“The secret of poetry is never explained,— is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, and the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, and knows not that they are such. 'T is as easy as breath. 'T is like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, and none knows what it is.”

“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.'”

“Englands genius filled all measureOf heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,Gave to the mind its emperor,And life was larger than before:Nor sequent centuries could hitOrbit and sum of Shakespeares wit. The men who lived with him becamePoets, for the air was fame.”

“For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.”

“Our best history is still poetry.”

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

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

“I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind,I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer's had,But O! my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind;I ran, I ran, from my love's side because my Heart went mad.”

“I cast my heart into my rhymes,That you, in the dim coming times,May know how my heart went with themAfter the red-rose-bordered hem.”