Quotes About Poetry

O that our dreamings all, of sleep or wake, Would all their colours from the sunset take.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy

A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no identity-he is continually infirming and filling some other body.

The two divinest things the world has got— A lovely woman and a rural spot.

I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

And must not, it may be asked, all this labour spent upon Keats' memory and remains, all this load of editing and re-editing and commentary and biography and scholiast-work laid upon a poet who declared that all poems ought to be understood without any comment, — must it not by this time have fairly smothered, or is it not at least in danger of smothering, Keats himself and his poetry?

I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir'd. So let me be thy choir, and make a moan Upon the midnight hours; Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet From swinged censer teeming; Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming. Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind: - Ode to Psyche - Excerpt

I feel confident I should have been a rebel Angel had the opportunity been mine.

Easy was the task: A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race!

Besides, a long poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Polar star of Poetry, as Fancy is the sails - and Imagination the rudder.

Endymion received mostly negative criticism after its release and Keats himself admitted its diffuse and unappealing style. It was damned by many critics, giving rise to Byron's quip that Keats was ultimately "snuffed out by an article", suggesting that he never truly got over the criticism the poem received.

John Gibson Lockhart, writing in Blackwood's Magazine, described Endymion as "imperturbable drivelling idiocy". With biting sarcasm, Lockhart advised, "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes

On the green of the hill We will drink our fill Of golden sunshine, Till our brains intertwine With the glory and grace of Apollo!

I must confess, that (since I am on the subject) I love you the more in that I believe you have liked me for my own sake and for nothing else. I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel.

Where are you now? How are the nymphs? I suppose they have led you a fine dance.

This is a mere matter of the moment. I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.

Then read from the treasured volume The poem of thy choice. And lend to the rhyme of the poet The beauty of thy voice. And the night shall be filled with music, And the cares, that infest the day, Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, And as silently steal away.

If you thought "Rabbie Burns" wrote "Auld Lang Syne," you'd be doubly wrong. Burns never signed his name "Rabbie" or "Robbie" (or, indeed, "Bobbie" Burns, as some North Americans insist on calling him). His signatures included "Robert," "Robin," "Rab"—and, on at least one occasion, "Spunkie.

Henry James described the Hopkins as a place where, despite "the immensities of pain" one thought of "fine poetry . . . and the high beauty of applied science. . . . Grim human alignments became, in their cool vistas, delicate symphonies in white. . . . Doctors ruled, for me, so gently, the whole still concert.

I wrote a fair amount of poetry in college. It was really, really bad. I mean, bad. And that's how I found out—by doing it.

If he had had no education, maybe Basho could have been a much greater poet.

Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content.

One attraction of Latin is that you can immerse yourself in the poems of Horace and Catullus without fretting over how to say, "Have a nice day."

Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril