14 William Wordsworth Quotes on Poetry

William Wordsworth quotes on poetry

4. A primrose by a river's brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more.

11. My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is father of the Man; I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.

27. The light that never was, on sea or land, The consecration, and the poet's dream.

43. I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride; Of Him who walked in glory and in joy Following his plough, along the mountain-side: By our own spirits are we deified: We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

45. And mighty poets in their misery dead.

75. Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart

78. Myriads of daisies have shone forth in flower Near the lark's nest, and in their natural hour Have passed away; less happy than the one That by the unwilling ploughshare died to prove The tender charm of poetry and love.

83. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.

85. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs-in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.

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

204. He lived amidst th'untrodden ways To Rydal Lake that lead:- A bard whom there were none to praise, And very few to read. Behind a cloud his mystic sense, Deep-hidden, who can spy? Bright as the night, when not a star Is shining in the sky. Unread his works - his 'Milk-white Doe' With dust is dark and dim; It's still in Longman's shop, and Oh! The difference to him!

205. He is in this sense the most original poet now living, and the one whose writings could the least be spared: for they have no substitute elsewhere. The vulgar do not read them; the learned, who see all things through books, do not understand them; the great despise. The fashionable may ridicule them: but the author has created himself an interest in the heart of the retired and lonely student of nature, which can never die.

208. Two voices are there: one is of the deep; It learns the storm-cloud's thunderous melody, Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea, Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep: And one is of an old half-witted sheep Which bleats articulate monotony, And indicates that two and one are three, That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep And, Wordsworth, both are thine.

209. Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.

     Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.