Quotes About Poetry

Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.

Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.

Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.

To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.

By the way, is there any difference between 'grey' and 'gray'? I believe there is, but I don't know what it is. In one place in the poem Smithers suggests 'gray'. In others he leaves 'grey'. Perhaps he is seeing red. I believe they are sympathetic colours in spectroscope investigations.

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

I can write no stately proem As a prelude to my lay; From a poet to a poem I would dare to say. For if of these fallen petals One to you seem fair, Love will waft it till it settles On your hair. And when wind and winter harden All the loveless land, It will whisper of the garden, You will understand.

The criminal classes are so close to us that even the policemen can see them.  They are so far away from us that only the poet can understand them.

Like all poetical natures he [Christ] loved ignorant people. He knew that in the soul of one who is ignorant there is always room for a great idea. But he could not stand stupid people, especially those who are made stupid by education: people who are full of opinions not one of which they even understand...

An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory.

Your days are your sonnets.

Meredith is a prose Browning. So is Browning.

We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. 

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.

To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.

Her hair clustered around her face like dark leaves round a pale rose.

I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here—a sign of unparalleled respect—because they are still capable of living by it.

Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?

The people need poetry that will be their own secret To keep them awake forever, And bathe them in the bright-haired wave of its breathing.

Only in Russia poetry is respected--it gets people killed.

Poetry comes fine spun from a mind at peace.

For such a career I lacked both endurance and inclination: the stress of ambition left me cold, while the Muse, the creative spirit, was forever urging on me that haven of leisure to which I'd always leaned. The poets of those days I cultivated and cherished: for me, bards were so many gods.

the gods are created by poets --Ovid

What did Sappho of Lesbos teach but how to love women?