Quotes About Poetry

There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.

One must have travelled a great deal to discover the obvious. One must have thoroughly rubbed and exhausted one's own eyes to get rid of the thousands of scales we start with...There are poets who have strived to do this...in quest of what I call the second innocence, the one that comes after knowing, the one that no longer knows, the one that knows how not to know.

If one proceeds philosophically before proceeding poetically, and this is central to the philosopher, pleasure is crushed, But if one begins by having pleasure, it is like knowing how to swim: one never forgets it [Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, trans Elizabeth Lowe & Earl Fitz, Foreword by Hélène Cixous trans Verena Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989].

To such as these we offer, with some confidence, and with no little sympathy, our collection of choice flowers, culled from the gardens of Poesy: may they refresh the mind, and gladden the heart, and beautify the path, of many a careworn toiler in the fields of labour, of whatsoever kind.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

The Poems of Robert W. Service.

The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. Paintings of Moreau are paintings of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom; Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself: A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

ere the hour of the twattering of bards in the twitterlitter between Druidia and the Deepsleep Sea

It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry.

He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry.

Do you feel how profound that is because you are a poet?

Ay say aye. I affirmly swear to it that it rooly and cooly boolyhooly was with my holyhagionous lips continuously poised upon the rubricated annuals of saint ulstar.

the stone for my month a nice aquamarine

Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

He doesn't know what he's saying. Taking a little more than is good for him. Absinthe, the greeneyed monster. I know him. He's a gentleman, a poet. It's alright.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

Weep no more, Comyn said. —Go on then, Talbot. —And the story, sir? —After, Stephen said. Go on, Talbot. A swarthy boy opened a book and propped it nimbly under the breastwork of his satchel. He recited jerks of verse with odd glances at the text: —Weep no more, woful shepherds, weep no more For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead, Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor...

He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music." ? James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

And they fell upong one another: and themselves they have fallen. And still nowanights and by nights of yore do all bold floras of the field to their shyfaun lovers say only: Cull me ere I wilt to thee!: and, but a little later: Pluck me whilst I blush!

There'll be bluebells blowing in salty sepulchres the night she signs her final tear.

An ambition to squint At my verses in print Makes me hope that for these you'll find room If you so condescend Then please place at the end The name of yours truly, L. Bloom

Su alma se desvaneció lentamente al escuchar el dulce descenso de la nieve a través del universo, su dulce caída, como el descenso de la última postrimería, sobre todos los vivos y los muertos.

And there were nice sentences in Doctor Cornwell's Spelling Book. They were like poetry but they were only sentences to learn spelling from