Quotes About Poetry

At least it gets me out of that incredible sense of constriction which I have on trying to find subjects for small bad poems, and feeling always that they should be perfect, which gives me that slick shiny artificial look.

O vase of acid, It is love you are full of.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.

You dozed, and watched the night revealing The thousand sordid images Of which your soul was constituted;

When we talk about Poetry, with a capital P, we are apt to think only of the more intense emotions or the more magical phrase: nevertheless there are a great many casements in poetry which are not magic, and which do not open on the foam of perilous seas, but are perfectly good windows for all that.

and we conclude that the division between Conservative verse and vers libre does not exist, for there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

In the dust of Her feet are the hosts of heaven/and Her star sequined hair/ Is crowned with a coven of six and seven/Blue suns burning there. —VICTOR H. ANDERSON (IN HIS POEM "QUAKORALINA," IN Thorns of the Blood Rose)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

Now that the lilacs are in bloom She has a bowl of lilacs in her room

April is the cruelest month.

Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.

Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown, Lilac and brown hair;

The essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal; it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.

the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

Poetry, if it is not to be a lifeless repetition of forms, must be constantly exploring the frontiers of the spirit. But these frontiers are not like the surveys of geographical explorers, conquered once for all and settled. The frontiers of the spirit are more like the jungle which, unless continuously kept under control, is always ready to encroach and eventually obliterate the cultivated area.

Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair-

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

the communication/of the dead is tongued with fire beyond/the language of the living--The Little Gidding