Quotes About Poetry

The painter puts brush to canvas, and the poet puts pen to paper. The poet has the easier task, for his pen does not alter his rhyme.

When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?

What so wild as words are?

God is the perfect poet, Who in his person acts his own creations.

To me at least was never evening yet But seemed far beautifuller than its day.

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,And did he stop and speak to you,And did you speak to him again?How strange it seems, and new!

Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,Burns, Shelley, were with us—they watch from their graves!

All poetry is difficult to read,—The sense of it is, anyhow.

Rafael made a century of sonnets.

Oh, to be in England now that April's there,And whoever wakes in England sees, some morning, unaware,That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheafRound the elm tree bole are in tiny leaf,While the chaffinch sings on the orchard boughIn England—now!

God is the perfect poet.

His locked, lettered, braw brass collarShowed him the gentleman an' scholar.

An' there began a lang digressionAbout the lords o' the creation.

The snowdrop and primrose our woodlands adorn, and violets bathe in the wet o' the morn.

I found that old Solomon proved it fair, That a big-belly'd bottle's a cure for all care.

Some rhyme a neebor's name to lash; Some rhyme, (vain thought!) for needfu' cash; Some rhyme to court the countra clash, An' raise a din; For me, an aim I never fash; I rhyme for fun.

All Poets are mad.

No good poem, however confessional is may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

Un verso [de un poema] quizá pueda llevarnos horas; pero si no parece una inspiración del momento, todo el trabajo habrá sido en vano. LA MALDICIÓN DE ADÁN, WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, 1865-1939

Qué sentís respecto a vuestro destino profetizado? He de saberlo, si tengo que componer esa oda heroica. —¿Que qué siento? (...) Cansancio. Me siento cansado.

yet not a quarter so well as you display yourself, for night-blooming dara lilies would weep with envy to see you stroll beside the moonlit water, as I would do, and make myself a bard to sing your praises by this very moon.

listening means learning to hear someone's inner world and deepest feelings with far greater attention in order that we don't let our own assumptions get in the way. The dying may speak in images far more akin to dreamland than the world of everyday reality. In order to understand them we have to make adjustments to comprehend a poetic form of expression that is sometimes elusive but actually far more expressive than the world of facts.

And what is written well and what is written badly...need we ask Lysias or any other poet or orator who ever wrote or will write either a political or other work, in meter or out of meter, poet or prose writer, to teach us this? What is good, PhÊdrus, and what is not good...need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and the myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know. The