Quotes About Poetry

Far clouds of feathery gold, Shaded with deepest purple, gleam Like islands on a dark blue sea.

He is a portion of the lovelinessWhich once he made more lovely.

[T]here is a harmony In autumn, and a luster in its sky...

Our sweetest songs are those that tell the saddest thoughts.

All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. 'The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being.

The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within...could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.

Poet's food is love and fame.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds

Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is the burden of the curse of Babel.

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Poetry] strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bear the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms.

The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.

it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet

Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert.

A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There

Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food.

Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world

Soon, sweet madness was poured upon my heart, a soft and thrilling sadness

Reading does not occupy me enough: the only relief I find springs from the composition of poetry, which necessitates contemplations that lift me above the stormy mist of sensations which are my habitual place of abode. I have lately been composing a poem on Keats; it is better than anything I have yet written and worthy both of him and of me.

Poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions.

Seek far from noise and day some western cave, Where woods and streams with soft and pausing winds A lulling murmur weave?— [_30 Ianthe] doth not sleep The dreamless sleep of death:- Shelley, Percy Bysshe (2011-03-24). The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Complete (Kindle Locations 317-319). . Kindle Edition.

We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The

Science, Poetry, and Thought Are thy lamps; they make the lot Of the dwellers in a cot So serene, they curse it not.

The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The