Quotes About Poetry

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

Great thoughts in crude, unshapely verse set forth lose half their preciousness, and ever must, unless the diamond with its own rich dust be cut and polished, it seems little worth.

Baseball is to our everyday experience what poetry often is to common speech — a slightly elevated and concentrated form.

And muse on nature with a poet's eye.

Rose-cheeked Laura, come;Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty'sSilent music, either otherSweetly gracing.

There is a garden in her faceWhere roses and white lilies grow;A heavenly paradise is that placeWherein all pleasant fruits do flow.There cherries grow which none may buy,Till "cherry-ripe" themselves do cry.

He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.

To our less philosophical readers, for example, it is now clear that the so passionate Teufelsdrockh precipitated through "a shivered Universe" in this extraordinary way, has only one of three things which he can next do: Establish himself in Bedlam; begin writing Satanic Poetry; or blow out his brains.

People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed – a knife – a purse – and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature.

Let there be a patron like Maecenus, Flaccus, and your lands will give you a poet like Virgil

Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible.

I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.

Yo no soy poeta. Leo poesía, pero jamás he podido escribir un solo verso. Y no porque no lo haya intentado.

A poesia traz grande beleza à vida, mas também uma grande tristeza, e não tenho a certeza se a troca é justa para alguém da minha idade. Um homem deveria gozar outras coisas, se pudesse - devia gastar osseus últimos dias ao sol. Os meus vão ser passados debaixo de uma lâmpada de leitura.

Life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time; that each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry, and talking to animals - that a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered. But most of all, I learned that life is about sitting on benches next to ancient creeks with my hand on her knee and sometimes, on good days, for falling in love.

La poesía aporta una gran belleza a la vida, pero también una gran tristeza, y no estoy seguro de que sea un intercambio justo para una persona de mi edad.

And then there is, of course, always, and inevitably, this spume of poetry that's just blowing out of the sulphurous flue-holes of the earth. Just masses of poetry. It's unstoppable, it's uncorkable. There's no way to make it end.