Quotes About Poetry

The hooves of the horse! Oh! witching and sweet is the music earth steals from the iron-shod feet; no whisper of love, no trilling of bird, can stir me as hooves on the horse have stirred.

Poetry is halfway between prose and music: it is sometimes like an intimate conversation, in words and phrases which need not be fully uttered, and sometimes like dancing and wordless music.

My poems are more my silence than my speech. Just as music is a kind of quiet. Sounds are needed only to unveil the various layers of silence.

My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which who listen had need bring docile thoughts and purged ears.

What a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.

As poetry is the harmony of words, so music is that of notes.

The romanticised life, where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from, is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence.

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills When all at once I saw a crowd A host of golden daffodils Beside the lake beneath the trees Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?

A woodpecker's drilling Echoes To the mountain clouds.

A sensitive plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew, And it opened its fan like leaves to the light, and closed them beneath the kisses of night.

At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.

Paul Valery speaks of the 'une ligne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself.

Ages elapsed ere Homer's lamp appear'd, And ages ere the Mantuan swan was heard: To carry nature lengths unknown before, To give a Milton birth, ask'd ages more.

Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.

Mud is the most poetical thing in the world.

In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature of language, particularly English, in the formation of my imagination and being.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

The rustling of the leaves is like a low hymn to nature.

The roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through the window pane are my children.