Quotes About Poetry

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom.

But language is wine upon his lips

But love--as the male novelists define it--and who, after all, speak with greater authority?--has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one's petticoat and--But we all know what love is.

She was married, true; but if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.

Here is Lady Winchilsea, for example, I thought, taking down her poems. She was born in the year 1661; she was noble both by birth and by marriage; she was childless; she wrote poetry, and one has only to open her poetry to find her bursting out in indignation against the position of women:

And that is the time to read poetry . . . when we are almost able to write it.

We read Charlotte Bronte not for exquisite observation of character, not for comedy, not for a philosophic view of life, but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, so that . . . they only have to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things

The night and the stars, the dawn coming up, the barges swimming past, the sun setting.... Ah dear, she sighed, well, the sunset is very lovely too. I sometimes think that poetry isn't so much what we write as what we feel, Mr. Denham.

Y el poema me parece que sólo es tu voz hablando.

Translating this to the spiritual regions as their wont is, the poets sang beautifully how roses fade and petals fall. The moment is brief they sang; the moment is over; one long night is then to be slept by all.

What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

That wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry.

First she starved herself of love, which meant also life; then of poetry in deference to what she thought her religion demanded.

To some few friends, and to thy sorrows sing, For groves of laurel thou wert nevermeant; Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou there content.

And then there it was, suddenly entire shaped in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here - the sonnet.

And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet, which was high praise from her husband.

And are you in love? And are you happy? And do you sometimes write a poem? And have you had your hair cut? And have you met anybody of such beauty your eyes dance, as the waves danced

Ellas [las flores] simbolizan sus pasiones, decoran sus festivales y cubren las almohadas de los difuntos (como si conocieran la pena). Por increíble que parezca, los poetas han encontrado religión en la naturaleza; la gente vive en el campo para aprender virtud de las plantas.

The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. But

The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now.

listen not to the bark of the guns and the bray of the gramophones but to the voices of the poets, answering each other, assuring us of a unity that rubs out divisions as if they were chalk marks only; to discuss with you the capacity of the human spirit to overflow boundaries and make unity out of multiplicity.

What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself — a voice answering a voice.