Quotes About Poetry

Longinus's text had recently been the subject of a detailed commentary by William Smith, and it was soon to be further popularized in Britain by Burke. Yet Johnson was suspicious, and not just because he considered the word 'sublime' a barbarous import. The theory threatened to unite aesthetics and psychology. As Napoleon would remark, 'Du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas.' It had already resulted in a flood of meretricious poetry

Johnson the poet recognizes that there are times when a little scientific precision may be sacrificed in the interests of a memorable formula. Thus 'to hiccough' is 'to sob with convulsion of the stomach', while an 'embryo' is 'the offspring yet unfinished in the womb'. 'Thumb' is defined simply as 'the short strong finger answering to the other four'. A 'puppet' is 'a wooden tragedian'.

Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

but the world is apt to make an erroneous estimate: ignorant of the dispositions which constitute our happiness or misery, they bring to an undistinguished scale the means of the one, as connected with power, wealth, or grandeur, and of the other with their contraries.  Philosophers and poets have often protested against this decision; but their arguments have been despised as declamatory, or ridiculed as romantic.

There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.

I will never be able to pound words into lines To match the velocity of your presence

The poets wrestle with the angel of sorrow till he leaves a blessing upon them.

From the waterfall he named her,Minnehaha, Laughing Water.

I heard the trailing garments of the NightSweep through her marble halls.

The bards sublime,Whose distant footsteps echoThrough the corridors of Time.

The day is done, and the darknessFalls from the wings of Night,As a feather is wafted downwardFrom an eagle in his flight.

In the long, sleepless watches of the night.

The grace of God is poetry...

Life meanwhile, the actual life of men with their real interests of health and sickness, labour and rest, with their interests of thought, science, poetry, music, love, affection, hatred, passion, went its way, as always, independently, apart from the political amity or enmity of Napoleon Bonaparte, and apart from all possible reforms.

The animalism of the brute nature in man is disgusting', he thought, 'but as long as it remains in its naked form we observe it from the height of our spiritual life and despise it; and - whether one has fallen or resisted - one remains what one was before. But when that same animalism hides under a cloak of poetry and aesthetic feeling and demands our worship - then we are swallowed up by it completely and worship animalism, no longer distinguishing good from evil. Then it is awful!

Life meanwhile—real life, with its essential interests of health and sickness, toil and rest, and its intellectual interests in thought, science, poetry, music, love, friendship, hatred, and passions—went on as usual, independently of and apart from political friendship or enmity with Napoleon Bonaparte and from all the schemes of reconstruction.

Kitty felt that Anna was perfectly unaffected and was not trying to conceal anything, but that she lived in another, higher world full of complex poetic interests beyond Kitty's reach.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. - W. B. Yeats

Bleeding, idleness and mist, he murmured in an unusual mood of poetry. It's like life, isn't it... First the wound, then the resting, and then the uncertainty of it all.

I also believe, along with Keats, that the Poetry of Earth is never dead, as long as Spring succeeds Winter, and man is there to perceive it....And finally, I believe that because all these things are true, Ives' Unanswered Question has an answer. I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I know the answer is Yes.

És hiszem Keatsszel, hogy a föld költészete véget mindaddig nem lel, amíg a telet tavasz követi, és van ember, aki észleli. Hiszem, hogy ebbÅ'l a földbÅ'l olyan zene sarjad, amely forrásai természeténél fogva tonális.

I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.

I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others it's for others to use.

Deprivation is the mother of poetry.