Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry.
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially.
Let's get my incantation right: "I wish I may, I wish I might" Give earth another satellite.
Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.
There are two ways of disliking poetry, one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.
What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.
The art of poetry is to touch the passions, and its duty to lead them on the side of virtue.
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.
Yea, marry, now it is somewhat, for now it is rhyme; before, it was neither rhyme nor reason.
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.
It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
Verses devoid of substance, melodious trifles. [Lat., Versus inopes rerum, nugaeque canorae.]
The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.
Ever since I was a kid, I've always been interested in the poetry of melancholy, if you like.
I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.
The poet uses the results of science and philosophy, and generalizes their widest deductions.
A poet's job is to find a name for everything: to be a fearless finder of the names of things.
Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.
Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.
Ever been kidnapped by a poet if i were a poet i'd kidnap you put you in my phrases and meter.
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
Summary riposte To the dreary wail There's no knowing what Love is all about. Poets know a lot.
I am one of those who hold that poetry is never so blithe as in a wanton and irregular subject.
The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?
And all poets love dust and mist because all the last answers. Go running back to dust and mist.
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize
It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.
In communist countries, you execute your poets. In the free world, the poets execute themselves.
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
My verse has brought me no roubles to spare: no craftsmen have made mahogany chairs for my house.
Chestnut brown canary, ruby throated sparrow, sing a song, don't be long, thrill me to the marrow.
Knowledge and increase of enduring joy From the great Nature that exists in works Of mighty Poets.
I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.
There is, in all great poets, a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise.
Every great poem is in itself limited by necessity, but in its suggestions unlimited and infinite.
The only gift is a portion of thyself . . . the poet brings his poem; the shepherd his lamb. . . .
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.
The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.
He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite.
I testify to rainbow feathers, to the span of heaven and walls of colour, the colonnades of jasper.