#Poetry Quotes

“"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.”

“Shall I compare thee to a summer day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate... When in eternal lines to time thou growst So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

“The truest poetry is the most feigning.”

“The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,Doth glance from heaven to earth,From earth to heaven.”

“We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to be the shadow of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is his chest; the suspicion she has awakened, is her ornament”

“I had rather be a Kitten, and cry mew, Than one of these same Meeter Ballad-mongers: I had rather heare a Brazen Candlestick turn'd, Or a dry Wheele grate on the Axle-tree, And that would set my teeth nothing an edge, Nothing so much, as mincing Poetrie.”

“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.”

“The poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him.”

“There comes a period of the imagination to each--a later youth--the power of beauty, the power of looks, of poetry.”

“The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.”

“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.”

“Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.”

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

“A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes uppermost, and, because he says every thing, saying, at last, something good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is nothing whimsical or fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.”

“The rhyme of the poetModulates the king's affairs.”

“Poetry being ... when we look from the center outward.”

“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”

“Every word was once a poem.”

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

“Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.”

“Language is fossil Poetry.”

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

“One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace; he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe.”

“Test of the poet is knowledge of love,For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove;Never was poet, of late or of yore,Who was not tremulous with love-lore.”

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

“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.”