Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes on Art
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With hue like that when some great painter dips His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.
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He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom, Nor heed nor see, what things they be; But from these create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality!
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Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong; They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
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Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
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Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
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Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow The world should listen then - as I am listening now.
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My Song, I fear that thou wilt find but few Who fitly shalt conceive thy reasoning, Of such hard matter dost thou entertain; Whence, if by misadventure, chance should bring Thee to base company (as chance may do), Quite unaware of what thou dost contain, I prithee, comfort thy sweet self again, My last delight! tell them that they are dull, And bid them own that thou art beautiful.
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Poor captive bird! Who, from thy narrow cage, Pourest such music, that it might assuage The rugged hearts of those who prisoned thee, Were they not deaf to all sweet melody.
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And others came... Desires and Adorations, Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies, Splendours, and GloOms, and glimmering Incarnations Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies; And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs, And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam Of her own dying smile instead of eyes, Came in slow pomp; - the moving pomp might seem Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.
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Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
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Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
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Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
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Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
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A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
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Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.