Quotes About Poetry

Even at its most spontaneous, [the Carmina ] has not the sudden miracle of the earliest vernacular ... It is the contrast between the thrushes in February and the violin.

i go through life watching the english language being raped before me face, like miniver cheevy, i was born too late. and like miniver cheevy i cough and call it fate and go on drinking.

I wanted to say, with as much sarcasm as I could put into my voice, "Sir, your poem is both original and interesting, but the part that is interesting is not original, and the part that is original is not interesting." But all I said was, "Not bad, you need to work on it some more.

Sometimes poets have to be imperfect so their poetry can be perfect.

All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they will never give the inner meaning of the original.

To feel keenly the poetry of a morning's roses, one has to have just escaped from the claws of this vulture which we call sickness.

First man knows, then he understands, last he sees, or thinks he sees, and embroiders. In the same way the true poet creates, then understands...sometimes.

One may guess the why and wherefore of a tear and yet find it too subtle to give any account of. A tear may be the poetical resume of so many simultaneous impressions, the quintessence of so many opposing thoughts! It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a single aroma.

O May! robed in your gown of flowers, Nun-like, gaze from your balmy cell, Under your crown of asphodel, And sentinel all the summer hours; Rising among your daisy bowers, Like Venus from her cradled shell!

O May! your cheeks are sunset skies, Which the lips of the verge shall press, And the amber clouds caress-- Drifting along in the light which lies Over your soul-lit, jasmine eyes, In all its golden tenderness!

Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.

It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live.

A world without wonder, and a way of mind without wonder, becomes a world without imagination, and without imagination man is a poor and stunted creature. Religion, poetry, and all the arts have their sources in this upwelling of wonder and surprise. Let us thank God that so much will forever remain out of reach, safe from our inquiry, inviolate forever from our touch.

Of all the days that's in the week I dearly love but one day And that's the day that comes betwixt A Saturday and Monday.

Namby Pamby's little rhymes,Little jingle, little chimes.

The unsatisfactoriness of definitions of poetry arises usually from one or other of two causes. If the definition is that of a critic, it is the resultant of a long analytical process, and therefore not very intelligible apart from the process by which it has been arrived at; if it is the definition of a poet, it is certain to contain that element of poetry which it professes to explain.

Poetry requires a manner of viewing things which is not that of the average man, but is individual to the poet; it requires, in a word, genius. One could hardly expect Milton to point this out; having genius himself he would assume that everyone else had genius; he would assume that we all had the power of looking at the world not only frankly but freshly because he would not understand any other way of looking at it.

Where there is no passion there can be no poetry.

In the eaves a swallow cri'th, And hark, the sound of whetting, Whetting and whetting the scythe On the dewy lawn: O blithe, Blithe sound, there's no forgetting.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

Poetry without music may be beautiful, but music gives poetry wings and elevates it into song. That may be the reason for our love of song-it has wings and lifts us; with proper songs, it is a nourishing spiritual exercise.

The present volume is the result of a taste for collecting poetical quotations, which beset me in the days of my nonage, now more than half a century ago.... I read the poets diligently, and registered, in a portable form, whatever I thought apposite and striking.

Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can go. Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone ...