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About this quote

What does it mean?
Poetry expresses humanity’s mystical side.
In plain terms
Poetry reveals the mysterious part of people.
What can you take from it?
Read poetry to connect with deeper human experience.

Where it applies

  • literary study
  • personal reflection

Putting it to work

  • attend poetry readings
  • write verses

Questions to consider

  • What does poetry make you feel about life?

Another view

Mystical language can be opaque to some readers.

More from Henry David Thoreau

  1. A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

    Permalink to quote #94
  2. A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured.

    Permalink to quote #96
  3. The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness betwee…

    Permalink to quote #93

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