Quotes About Poetry

Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.

Happy the bard, (if that fair name belong To him that blends no fable with his song) Whose lines uniting, by an honest art, The faithful monitors and poets part, Seek to delight, that they may mend mankind, And while they captivate, inform the mind. Still happier, if he till a thankful soil, And fruit reward his honorable toil: But happier far who comfort those that wait To hear plain truth at Judah's hallow'd gate

The little wind-flower, whose just opened eye Is blue as the spring heaven it gazes at.

I broke the spell that held me long, The dear, dear witchery of song. I said, the poet's idle lore Shall waste my prime of years no more, For Poetry, though heavenly born, Consorts with poverty and scorn.

O reverend Chaucere, rose of rethoris all,As in oure tong ane flour imperiall, That raise in Britane evir, quho redis rycht,Thou beris of makaris the triumph riall.

Protest poetry -- could there be consensus poetry?

Aristotle stipulates that "the poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose … The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.

the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

It is because of the wealth of implication which must be carried by sentences in poetry, because they must start from scratch and put the reader in possession of the entire attitude they assume, that the notion of ' sincerity ' is important, and that it is so hard to imitate a style.

Thus a poetical word is a thing conceived in itself and includes all its meanings; a prosaic word is flat and useful and might have been used differently.

Poetry, like sanctity, is the orchestration of multiple attributes into vast, compelling wholes.

A poem is contained movement.

It is in the order of the imagination, the order of poetry, that the possible exceeds itself, is sanctified in excess.

Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

SAY IT. Go ahead, stand before the mirror, look at your mouth, and say it. Blue. See how you pucker up, your lips opening with the consonants into a kiss, and then that final exhalation of vowels? Blue. The word looks like what it is, a syllable blown out into the air, and with the sound and the sight of saying it as one.

The responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point physics, philosophy, and poetry unite with Satan in their determination not to serve. Any end is higher than utility, when ends are up.

There are few poets today who can equal, in their esthetic exploitation of language, in their depth of commitment to their medium, in their range of conceptual understanding, in the purity of their closed forms, the work of Nabokov, Borges, Beckett, Barth, Broch, Gaddis, or Calvino, or any of half-a-dozen extraordinarily gifted South Americans.

Those hundreds of feet were light. In washing them off, I pretended the hose was a pump. What have I missed? Childhood is a lie of poetry.

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can't pick up a page. All the words slide off.

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.

He who has a contempt for poetry cannot have much respect for himself or for anything else.

The poetry of each age may be considered as vitally connected with, and as vividly reflective of, its character and progress, as either its politics or its religion.