Quotes About Poetry

For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds, And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds;

Illustrious acts high raptures do infuse,And every conqueror creates a muse.

To a Young Poet Time cannot break the bird's wing from the bird. Bird and wing together Go down, one feather. No thing that ever flew, Not the lark, not you, Can die as others do.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

If in the moonlight from the silent bough Suddenly with precision speak your name The nightingale, be not assured that now His wing is limed and his wild virtue tame. Beauty beyond all feathers that have flown Is free; you shall not hood her to your wrist, Nor sting her eyes, nor have her for your own In any fashion; beauty billed and kissed Is not your turtle; tread her like a dove - She loves you not; she never heard of love.

You will see such webs on the wet grass, maybe, As a pixie-mother weaves for her baby, You will find such flame at the wave's weedy ebb As flashes in the meshes of a mer-mother's web, But there comes to birth no common spawn From the love of a priest for a leprechaun, And you never have seen and you never will see Such things as the things that swaddled me!

There is poetry and music in our technology, a beauty as touching as that of eagle, moss campion, raven or yonder limestone boulder shining under the Arctic sun.

Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him.

In honor of the occasion (May Day), I tack a scarlet bandanna to the ridgepole of the ramada, where my Chinese wind bells also hang, jangling in the breeze. The red flag flutters brightly over the bells – poetry and revolution before breakfast.

In recording my impressions of the natural scene I have striven above all for accuracy, since I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact. But the desert is a vast world, an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea. Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite.

However, he initially saw no moral issue with Falkland and dismissed any criticism of the work as faux outrage and contended that he was content to attract readers to his works by any means, including controversy. Leslie George Mitchell states that Bulwer-Lytton, or just Bulwer as he was known at that time, considered his poetry to be his finest work and wished to increase its readership through his novel writing and reputation.

Let the bard from Smyrna catalogue Harma, the ledges and caves of Thaca, the milk-fed damsels of Achaia, pigeon-flocked Thisbe or the woods of Onchestus, I sing of Oak, Walnut, Chesnut, Maple and Elm Streets.

For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.

A girl without freckles is like a night without stars.

I sing of a maidenThat is makeless;King of all kingsTo her son she ches.

The cedars of Lebanon.

Everyone who drinks is not a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.

I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.

If the author had said "Let us put on appropriate galoshes," there could, of course, have been no poem.

Thy neck is as a tower of ivory.

Thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies.

The holly and the ivy,When they are both full grown,Of all the trees that are in the wood,The holly bears the crown:The rising of the sunAnd the running of the deer,The playing of the merry organ,Sweet singing in the choir.

Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.

A horse is poetry in motion.