Quotes About Poetry

Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.

The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.

The crown of literature is poetry.

Poetry Its door opens near. It's a shrine by the road, it's a flower in the parking lot of The Pentagon, it says, "Look around, listen. Feel the air." It interrupts international telephone lines with a tune. When traffic lines jam, it gets out and dances on the bridge. If great people get distracted by fame they forget this essential kind of breathing and they die inside their gold shell. When caravans cross deserts it is the secret treasure hidden under the jewels.

Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?

Abel talked about Amanda, about her poetry, her grace, her tendency to dream. He speculated on why her movements, her gestures, her voice, her way of dressing, were so much more charming and heart-winning than those of any other female mouse he had ever known, including his own dear mother and favorite sister. It puzzled him. "It's the magic of love," burped Gower.

When Aristotle said that poetry is superior to history because history only tells us "what Alcibiades did or had done to him," he had in mind history as the mere compilation of facts. To matter, history has to do more. It has to reconnect people, in time, to what Aristotle called the "timeless forms" of nature.

The poet's darling.

In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs—in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.

And now I see with eye sereneThe very pulse of the machine.

Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:England hath need of thee: she is a fenOf stagnant waters.

Scorn not the sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,Mindless of its just honors; with this keyShakespeare unlocked his heart.

Two voices are there: one is of the sea,One of the mountains; each a mighty voice.

I wandered lonely as a cloudThat floats on high o'er vales and hills,When all at once I saw a crowd,A host, of golden daffodils.

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills When all at once I saw a crowd A host of golden daffodils Beside the lake beneath the trees Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man.

poetry is the breath and finer spirit of knowledge

Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is the countenance of all science.

Go to the poets, they will speak to thee More perfectly of purer creatures--

Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things And battles long ago.

to be incapable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature

Choice word, and measured phrase; above the reach   Of ordinary men; a stately speech!