Quotes About Poetry

Poetry's got a really particular kind of magic. It brings together storytelling, music,lyric,really deep intense feeling, it just seems like a really irresistible concoction to me.

A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem, and, measured in sweat and blood, will bring better remuneration.

Then one can't make a living out of poetry? Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.

Music is the universal language of mankind -- poetry their universal pastime and delight.

The gentle wind, a sweet and passionate wooer, Kisses the blushing leaf.

The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, -- the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made.

Perhaps the chief cause which has retarded the progress of poetry in America, is the want of that exclusive cultivation, which so noble a branch of literature would seem to require. Few here think of relying upon the exertion of poetic talent for a livelihood, and of making literature the profession of life. The bar or the pulpit claims the greater part of the scholar's existence, and poetry is made its pastime.

It frequently happens that where the second line is sublime, the third, in which he [Lucan] meant to rise still higher, is perfect bombast.

In the Odyssey one may liken Homer to the setting sun, of which the grandeur remains without the intensity.

Nise: Bien lo merece Eliodoro, griego poeta divino. Celia: ¿Poeta? Pues parecióme prosa. Nise: También hay poesía en prosa.

Since I know you don't like me, don't bother answering, because it would trouble you; but I remember you always and I keep a place for you in my heart, brimful of poetry.

Never let me lose the marvel of your statue eyes or the accent that by night the solitary rose of your breath places on my cheek.

My tongue is pierced with glass.

My poetry is a game. My life is a game. But I am not a game.

Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!

Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.

When people say, "I've told you fifty times," / They mean to scold, and very often do; / When poets say, "I've written fifty rhymes," / They make you dread that they 'II recite them too; In gangs of fifty, thieves commit their crimes; / At fifty love for love is rare, 't is true, / But then, no doubt, it equally as true is, / A good deal may be bought for fifty Louis.

I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion.

No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don't I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.

It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earth-quake-they say Poets never or rarely go mad...but are generally so near it-that I cannot help thinking rhyme is so far useful in anticipating & preventing the disorder.

Oh, bella, admirada España, romántico país ¿Dónde está aquella bandera que Pelayo enarboló?

The rhyme obliges me to this; sometimes Monarchs are less imperative than rhymes)

Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation - [Keats] is always frigging his imagination. - I don't mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam of vision produced by raw pork and opium.

There's music in the sighing of a reed; There's music in the gushing of a rill; There's music in all things, if men had ears; The earth is but the music of the spheres.