Quotes About Poetry

Sydney, I rather despair of making myself intelligible to you, because you are such an insensible dog." "And you," returned Sydney, busy concocting the punch, "are such a sensitive and poetical spirit—

It would come dearer...for when a person comes to grind off poetry night after night, it is but right that he should expect to be paid for its weakening effect upon his mind.

How softly runs the afternoon Beneath the billowy clouds of June!

This little insect of the poets...

O lady-bird, O lady-bird, With the summer coming fresh! And the April hopes and buttercups, Knitting finely, in a mesh Of sunny-shining rays, For the samite-robèd days, For my heart with all your beauty stirr'd, O lady-bird, my lady-bird!

The ladybug's a beetle. It's shaped like a pea. Its color is a bright red With lots of spots to see. Although the name is ladybug Some ladybugs are men. So why don't we say "gentleman bug" Every now and then?

Slang is the illegitimate sister of Poetry.

"The Ancient Mariner" — This poem would not have taken so well if it had been called "The Old Sailor"...

I love old poems, ladies who lived in past times. Life was maybe not easier, but people took time to idle sometime, and mostly they took time admiring a sunrise, the flowers opening their hearts, etc.

I love my love with an M because through all one year in riding to work and back together, we carried Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Fatal Interview" in the automobile, and learned twenty-seven of the sonnets by heart. (A traffic stop is just time enough to say a sonnet if you really know it well.)

[T]here are few mental exercises better than learning great poetry or prose by heart.

The test of real literature is that it will bear repetition. We read over the same pages again and again, and always with fresh delight.

Dawn is a friend of the muses.

F.B., "Notes of Music," 1848

Black care shall be lessened by sweet song.

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers, Of April, May, of June, and July-flowers...

Nothing is to be called a fault in poetry, says Aristotle, but what is against the art: therefore a man may be an admirable poet, without being an exact chronologer.

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes...

A prose-writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought!... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.

Prose is too coarse, too heavy for romance — We need poetry for love & all things of chance.

When you unprose language, does it become poetry?

My thirst and passion from boyhood... has been for poetry — for poetry in its widest and wildest sense — for poetry untrammelled by the laws of sense, rhyme, or rhythm, soaring through the universe, and echoing the music of the spheres! From my youth, nay, from my very cradle, I have yearned for poetry, for beauty, for novelty, for romancement.

I think poetry is the greatest of the arts. It combines music and painting and story-telling and prophecy and the dance. It is religious in tone, scientific in attitude. A true poem contains the seed of wonder...