Quotes About Poetry

I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.

You're a true poet: but, my dear, If you would hold the public ear, Remember to be not too clear. Be strange, be verbally intense; Words matter ten times more than sense; In clear streams, under sunny skies, The fish you angle for won't rise; In turbid water, cloudy weather, They'll rush to you by shoals together.

Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nighTo learned Chaucer; and rare Beaumont, lieA little nearer Spenser; to make roomFor Shakespeare in your threefold fourfold tomb.

Locke sank into a swoon;The Garden died;God took the spinning-jennyOut of his side.

Irish poets, learn your trade,Sing whatever is well made.

Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.

Under bare Ben Bulben's headIn Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.

And I may dine at journey's endWith Landor and with Donne.

Upon the brimming water among the stonesAre nine-and-fifty swans.

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.

And now he is singing a bard's curse upon you, O brother abbot, and upon your father and your mother, and your grandfather and your grandmother, nd upon all your relations.' Is he cursing in rhyme?' He is cursing in rhyme, and with two assonances in every line of his curse.' ("The Crucifixion Of The Outcast")

But he heard high up in the air A piper piping away, And never was piping so sad, And never was piping so gay.

Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn.

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.

Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.

A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.

You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty Shaken by your beauty Shaken.

Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze.

In summer, the song sings itself.

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.

If aught of oaten stop or pastoral songMay hope, O pensive Eve, to soothe thine ear.