Quotes About Poetry

Though what is understood as religious sentiment comes next to the love of individuals for each other in the extent of its influence, it has produced much verse, but, it must be allowed, little poetry, the reason probably being that the religious sentiment of the few who are endowed with the gift of writing poetry differs from that of the average "religious" person.

Piping a simple song for thinking hearts, is all very well. But it will not do to say, or to suggest, or to allow it to be inferred, that doing this makes a man as great a poet.

From sunny woof and cloudy weft Fell rain in sheets; so, to myself I hummed these hazard rhymes, and left The learned volume on the shelf.

Almost as essential to poetry, and equally as regards poetry of the loftiest and poetry of the lowliest kind, is lucidity, or clearness of expression. No poet of much account is ever obscure, unless the text happens to be corrupt.

But I trust I shall not give offence if I say that the number of my countrymen and countrywomen who lay stress on the artistic manner, whether in verse or prose, in which an opinion is expressed, compared with the number of those who value poetry or prose chiefly because it expresses the opinions they value and the sentiments they cherish, is very small.

No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

The most generous critic, if he is to be discriminating and just, cannot, let me say again, allow that any verse which is profoundly obscure or utterly unmusical, no matter how intellectual in substance, deserves the appellation of poetry.

Is the conclusion then that a pessimistic criticism of life necessarily makes a poet greater than another poet who criticizes it from an optimistic point of view? Not in the least. The consideration—we do not say to the positive philosopher, to the historian, to the moralist, but—to the disinterested lover of poetry, is simply irrelevant.

Some of the finest poetry ever written upon life is to be found surely in the Old Testament.

It will scarcely be doubted, therefore, that there does exist a real and a very grave danger lest Poetry should, in these perplexing and despondent days, not only be closely associated with Pessimism, but should become for the most part its voice and echo.

If this be poetry, then poetry is very easily written, and what has hitherto been supposed to be the highest, the most difficult, and the rarest, of the arts, presents no more difficulty to the person who knows how to write at all than the simplest, baldest, and most unartistic prose.

But if poetry is now comparatively little read, no one can deny that it is much written about.

No doubt Plato's notion that poets should chant nothing but hymns to the Gods and praises of virtue is a little narrow and exacting, but if they are to sing songs worthy of themselves, and of mankind, they must be on the side of virtue and of the Gods.

Now the highest literature—and Poetry is confessedly the highest literature—is a transfiguring reflex of life; and in its magic mirror we perforce see reflected all the thoughts, feelings, interests, passions, and events of human existence.

The most despairing songs are the loveliest of all,I know immortal ones composed only of tears.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives

But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.

For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.

I am a romantic, in a literary way, by which I mean the Romantic poets, who thought just because a sensation is fleeting doesn't mean it isn't valuable. If the only criterion of value is whether something lasts, then the whole of human life is a waste of time.

I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.