Quotes About Poetry

Dickens' plots are his most discardable properties, and often have to be pushed aside to let the strange poetry of his imagination emerge.

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.

The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives every day what he cannot define. It is feeling that is first. What one cannot help but sense in good poetry is a sense of the whole language stirring toward richer possibilities than one could have foreseen.

Poetry is man's best means of perceiving most profoundly the action and the consequence of his own emotions.

There is nothing but poetry about the existence of childhood real simple soul-moving poetry the laughter and joy of poetry and not its philosophy and there is nothing of poetry about manhood but the reflection and the remembrance of what has been—nothing more

I found the poems in the fields, And only wrote them down.

I wish I was what I have been And what I was could be As when I roved in shadows green And loved my willow tree To gaze upon the starry sky And higher fancies build And make in solitary joy Loves temple in the field

In mid-wood silence, thus, how sweet to be; Where all the noises, that on peace intrude, Come from the chittering cricket, bird, and bee, Whose songs have charms to sweeten solitude.

Poets can dodge. ("Evening Primrose")

High on the hilltop The old King sits; He is now so old and gray He's nigh lost his wits. —Allingham, The Fairies

It's something we, guys, have all done. Made tapes for girls, trying to impress them, to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it, because you're too awkward to do it.

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

Dull sublunary lovers' love(Whose soul is sense) cannot admitAbsence, because it doth removeThose things which elemented it.

No spring nor summer's beauty hath such grace As I have seen in one Autumnal face....

Her pure, and eloquent bloodSpoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,That one might almost say, her body thought.

I am two fools, I know,For loving, and for saying soIn whining poetry.

The AlphabetOf flowers.

Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, For, he tames it, that fetters it in verse.

BUSY old fool, unruly Sun, Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains, call on us? Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ? Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide Late school-boys and sour prentices, Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride, Call country ants to harvest offices ; Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime, Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

All measure, and all language, I should pass, Should I tell what a miracle she was.

If that be simply perfectest Which can by no way be expresst But negatives, my love is so. To All, which all love, I say no. Negative Love

I wonder, by my troth, what thou, and I Did, till we lov'd.

I am two fools, I know, For loving, and for saying so In whining poetry; But where's that wiseman, that would not be I, If she would not deny? Then as th' earth's inward narrow crooked lanes Do purge sea water's fretful salt away, I thought, if I could draw my pains Through rhyme's vexation, I should them allay. Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, For he tames it, that fetters it in verse.