Quotes About Poetry

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world":

that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world.

Like an infant's smile, over the dead A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread. - Adonais

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man.

Our sweetest songs are those of saddest thought.

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell Of saddest thought.

I arise from dreams of thee, And a spirit in my feet Has led me- who knows how? To thy chamber-window, Sweet!

And as this creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their art

Emily Dickinson, he "tells it slant." Tell all the Truth but tell it slant— Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind—

With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.

It is the kind of stoicism which had been seen as characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry, perhaps nowhere better expressed than in 'The Battle of Maldon' where the most famous Saxon or English cry has been rendered - 'Courage must be the firmer, heart the bolder, spirit must be the greater, as our strength grows less'. That combination of bravery and fatalism, endurance and understatement, is the defining mood of Arhurian legend.

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.

What is important-what lasts-in another language is not what is said but what is written. For the essence of an age, we look to its poetry and its prose, not its talk shows.

The first night Stephen and I slept together, he whispered numbers into my ear: long, high numbers -- distances between planets, seconds in a life. He spoke as if they were poetry, and they became poetry. Later, when he fell asleep, I leaned over him and watched, trying to picture a mathematician's dreams. I concluded that Stephen must dream in abstract, cool designs like Mondrian paintings.

Poetry chooses choice things, carefully selecting select words, arranging, fabulously, things arranged. To put it differently is hard, if not out of the question.

Allow this poem to carry you beyond yourself, transcending your mortal flesh as you wed yourself with the potentially infinite.

Poetry has isolated me from the world more than it has connected me to it.

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.

Poetry is composing for the breath.

My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.