Quotes About Poetry

The sun gives us light, but the moon provides inspiration. If you look at the sun without shielding your eyes, you'll go blind. If you look at the moon without covering your eyes, you'll become a poet.

It is the hour when from the boughs The nightingale's high note is heard; It is the hour when lovers' vows Seem sweet in every whisper'd word.

The angel of spring, the mellow-throated nightingale.

A book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread - and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness - Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

A perfect poem is impossible. Once it has been written, the world would end.

All men are poets at heart.

Modern poets mix too much water with their ink.

The man is either mad or he is making verses.

Poets have a license to lie.

Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.

When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages.

I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.

A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or alovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.

Poetry was the maiden I loved, but politics was the harridan I married.

You know, my friends, with what a brave carouse I made a second marriage in my house; Divorced old barren reason from my bed, And took the daughter of the vine to spouse.

Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity: nothing is better than simplicity.

His speech flowed from his tongue sweeter than honey.

For seldom shall she hear a tale So sad, so tender, yet so true.

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; morals, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

'twas bryllig and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths out grabe.

Similes are like songs of love: They much describe, they nothing prove.