Poetry

"Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry"

"Despite all the lying hype about “diversity” and “openness” and “inclusion,” American poetry was becoming a closed corporation for a rather narrow bandwidth of sociopolitical opinion."

"The English language is a magnificent treasure bequeathed to us by centuries of literary achievement. And you’re going to write all your poems using the Fourth-Grade Basal Vocabulary List? Grow up."

"He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life."

"Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air. … Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. … Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. … Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment."

"A poem works or fails to work; no amount of argufying can convert an experienced reader."

"And, as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name."

"I had rather be a kitten, and cry mew, Than one of these same metre ballet-mongers; I had rather hear a brazen canstick turn'd, Or a dry wheel grate on the axletree; And that would set my teeth nothing on edge, Nothing so much as mincing poetry: 'Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag."

"O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention."

"The elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy."

"I was not born under a rhyming planet."

"Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme."

"…poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."

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

"if you read the poems of someone somewhere you know a lot more about that country than you know if you just study its crops or weather conditions."

"all poems belong to anyone who loves them."

"… ζωγραφίαν ποίησιν σιωπῶσαν προσαγορεύει [sc. ὁ Σιμωνίδης], τὴν δὲ ποίησιν ζωγραφίαν λαλοῦσαν."

"I was promised on a time To have reason for my rhime; From that time until this season I received nor rhime nor reason."

"Poetry is an overlooked and underrated kind of art."

"The idea of poetry in our Navajo world, speaking — Ya’ jił’tí’i’gí’ — Diníbizaad — is related to the whole — one’s whole life, the whole community. It’s not separated the way poetry is in Western society."

"You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick...You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in."

"A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him."

"My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it."

"Good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech."

"The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to."

"If books represent the heart of the Guru Buddha, then poetry represents a beautiful song in the Guru Buddha's heart."

"The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see—it is, rather, a light by which we may see—and what we see is life."

"If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur, it is certain that they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere — probably more than the rest of the world combined. Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations — many rare combinations. To have great poets, there must be great audiences too."

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."

"He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise."

"It is difficult to get the news from poems"

"Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a ‘poetic mood’. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one’s thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself."

"I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."

"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry."

"There is in Poesy a decent pride, Which well becomes her when she speaks to Prose, Her younger sister."

"Poetry is a constructed conversation on the frontier of dreaming."

"The fatal facility of the octosyllabic verse."

"In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column: In the pentameter aye falling in melody back."

"Prose—words in their best order;—poetry—the best words in their best order."

"Made poetry a mere mechanic art."

"Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme? Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread, By winding myrtle round your ruin'd shed?"

"Why then we should drop into poetry."

"When the brain gets as dry as an empty nut, When the reason stands on its squarest toes, When the mind (like a beard) has a "formal cut,"— There is a place and enough for the pains of prose; But whenever the May-blood stirs and glows, And the young year draws to the "golden prime," And Sir Romeo sticks in his ear a rose,— Then hey! for the ripple of laughing rhyme!"

"'Twas he that ranged the words at random flung, Pierced the fair pearls and them together strung."

"The true poem is the poet's mind."

"For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem."

"It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem."

"The finest poetry was first experience."

"Oh love will make a dog howl in rhyme."

"What is a Sonnet? 'Tis the pearly shell That murmurs of the far-off, murmuring sea; A precious jewel carved most curiously; It is a little picture painted well. What is a Sonnet? 'Tis the tear that fell From a great poet's hidden ecstasy; A two-edged sword, a star, a song—ah me! Sometimes a heavy tolling funeral bell."