Quotes About Poetry

Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.

Coming in solemn beauty like slow old tunes of Spain.

Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.

Love makes temporary saints and poets of us all. We feel the source of life welling up inside us and long to express the joy it brings and share it with the partner of our heart's awakening.

Poetry was made for the bath, Mitzi believed. She was partial to Pablo Neruda.

We shall walk in velvet shoes:Wherever we goSilence will fall like dewsOn white silence below.

The icicles wreathing On trees in festoon Swing, swayed to our breathing: They're made of the moon.

Poetry is that which is worth translating. The poem dies when it has no place to go.

Great poetry lives in a state of perpetual transformation, perpetual translation: the poem dies when it has no place to go.

What is WIND and what is BONE have never been conclusively determined by the generations of Chinese critics, but what is certain, according to Liu Hsieh, is that the perfect combination or balance of WIND and BONE, the metaphor for the ideal poem, is a bird.

Chinese prosody is largely concerned with the number of characters per line and the arrangement of tones - both of which are untranslatable. But translators tend to rush in where wise men never, tread, and often may be seen attempting to nurture Chinese rhyme patterns in the hostile environment of Western language.

The C-list girls who just banded together to create their own little utopia. Those are the girls you want to be, it couldn't be clearer in hindsight. Early anarchists. Badasses. They didn't bother, exempted themselves, turned their backs and took up softball, computer science, gardening, poetry, sewing. Those are the ones with a shot at becoming fairly content happy/tough/certain/fulfilled/gray-haired grown women. An

Oh, it was fair in Arcady! Birds built and sang in every tree, And trill and warble, chirp and song, Rang sweet and clear the whole day long; The violets blossomed all the year, No lightnings scathed our happy sphere, Nor frost congealed on wood or lea, What time we dwelt in Arcady!

Poetry is what you find in the dirt in the corner, overhear on the bus, God in the details, the only way to get from here to there.

And Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Ben, Whose fire-hearts sowed our furrows when The world was worthy of such men.

And Chaucer, with his infantine Familiar clasp of things divine.

There Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb The crowns o the world; oh, eyes sublime With tears and laughter for all time!

I remember, when I was a child and wrote poems in little clasped books, I used to kiss the books and put them away tenderly because I had been happy near them, and take them out by turns when I was going from home, to cheer them by the change of air and the pleasure of the new place. This, not for the sake of the verses written in them, and not for the sake of writing more verses in them, but from pure gratitude.

By the last American packet I had two letters, one from a poet of Massachusetts, and another from a poetess: the he, Mr. Lowell, and the she, Mrs. Sigourney. She says that the sound of my poetry is stirring the 'deep green forests of the New World;' which sounds pleasantly, does it not?

The other day, however, Mrs. Trollope and her daughter-in-law called on us, and it is settled that we are to know them; though Robert had made a sort of vow never to sit in the same room with the author of certain books directed against liberal institutions and Victor Hugo's poetry.

It is but two days ago since I had a letter — and not from a fanatic — to reproach my poetry for not being Christian enough, and this is not the first instance, nor the second, of my receiving such a reproach. I tell you this to open to you the possibility of another side to the question, which makes, you see, a triangle of it!

And now I am fit for rivalship with your clocks, papa having given me an Aeolian harp for the purpose. Do you know the music of an Aeolian harp, and that nothing below the spherical harmonies is so sweet and soft and mournfully wild? The amusing part of it is (after the poetical) that Flushie is jealous and thinks it is alive, and takes it as very hard that I should say 'beautiful' to anything except his ears!

To-day Mr. Poe sent me a volume containing his poems and tales collected, so now I must write and thank him for his dedication. What is to be said, I wonder, when a man calls you the 'noblest of your sex'? 'Sir, you are the most discerning of yours.' Were you thanked for the garden ticket yesterday? No, everybody was ungrateful, down to Flush, who drinks day by day out of his new purple cup, and had it properly explained how you gave it to

I heard of the Reverend somebody Stoddart gravely proposing 'Poetry for the Million' to his audience; he assuring them that 'poets made a mystery of their art,' but that in fact nothing except an English grammar, and a rhyming dictionary, and some instruction about counting on the fingers, was necessary in order to make a poet of any man! This is a fact. And to this extent has the art, once called divine, been desecrated among the educated classes of our country.