967 Poetry Quotes

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

How many voices have escaped you until now, the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot, the steady accusations of the clock numbering the minutes no one will mark. The terrible clarity this moment brings, the useless insight, the unbroken dark.

The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale.

Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the ability to evaluate literature outside the critical act. A work is good only in proportion to the richness and complexity of interpretations it provokes.

In America, the term younger poet is applied with chivalric liberality. It can be used to describe anyone not yet collecting a Social Security pension.

Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.

When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.

I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth.

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

There is no longer beauty except in the struggle. No more masterpieces without an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault against the unknown forces in order to overcome them and prostrate them before men.

The scientist has marched in and taken the place of the poet. But one day somebody will find the solution to the problems of the world and remember, it will be a poet, not a scientist.

Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

The song seraphically free Of taint of personality, So pure that it salutes the suns The voice of one for millions, In whom the millions rejoice For giving their one spirit voice.

Near the lake where drooped the willow, Long time ago!

I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free, from world to world, from all worlds carried me.

It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.

Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me. I have begun to doubt Tennyson.

I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.

When a sonnet is mediocre it is bad, for it should be sublime.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Poetry is life distilled.

The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of bards, giving way to the corrupt influences of a decaying general culture, seems to have abandoned all the properties of versification and reason in its mad scramble after sensational novelty; whilst the other and quieter school constituting a more logical evolution from the poesy of the Georgian period, demands an accuracy of rhyme and metre unknown even to the polished artists of the age of Pope.

The soul of man is larger than the sky, Deeper than ocean, or the abysmal dark Of the unfathomed center.

Her very frowns are fairer far Than smiles of other maidens are.

Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.

As I came down the Highgate Hill, The Highgate Hill, the Highgate Hill, As I came down the Highgate Hill I met the sun's bravado, And saw below me, fold on fold, Grey to pearl and pearl to gold, This London like a land of old, The land of Eldorado.

The tree looks like a dog, barking at heaven.

A friend came over to the house a few days ago and read one of my poems. He came back today and asked to read the same poem over again. After he finished reading it, he said, 'It makes me want to write poetry.'

As Tammie glow'red, amazed, and curious, The mirth and fun grew fast and furious.

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers: Of April, May, of June, and July flowers. I sing of Maypoles, Hock-carts, wassails, wakes, Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes.

For Rhime the Rudder is of Verses, With which like Ships they steer their courses.

The frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind.

And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin Is pride that apes humility.

Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry.

Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense at all events; just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least.

But metre itself implies a passion, i.e. a state of excitement, both in the Poet's mind, & is expected in that of the Reader.

I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

If all the world and love were young, And truth in every shepherd's tongue, These pretty pleasures might me move To live with thee and be thy Love.

Cancel me not - for what then shall remain? Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

I was reading the dictionary; I thought it was a poem about everything.

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur 'Thou still unravished bride of quietness,' then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.

A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.

O'er her warm cheek and rising bosom move The bloom of young Desire and purple light of Love.

Alas, regardless of their doom, The little victims play! No sense have they of ills to come, Nor care beyond today.

Thy fatal shafts unerring move, I bow before thine altar, Love!

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.

My silks and fine array, My smiles and languished air, By love are driv'n away; And mournful lean Despair Brings me yew to deck my grave: Such end true lovers have.

And I made a rural pen, And I stained the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear.

The moon like a flower In heaven's high bower, With silent delight, Sits and smiles on the night.

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit, Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame, Where blood-begotten spirits come And all complexities of fury leave, Dying into a dance, An agony of trance, An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.

There is a pleasure in poetic pains Which only poets know.

Thine eyes are springs in whose serene And silent waters heaven is seen; Their lashes are the herbs that look On their young figures in the brook.

[Thanatopsis] was written in 1817, when Bryant was 23. Had he died then, the world would have thought it had lost a great poet. But he lived on.

Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.

But oh, Mesdames, if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and tetrameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every schoolmaster perish miserably!

Love is a beautiful dream.

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

Loved once for ever loved: how surely sounds This gospel to me since I learned to list Truth from thy lips, mine own evangelist. What thought presumes to set now any bounds To Love whose being informs us and surrounds?

As I go musing through this mournful land Soothed by the pine-tree's solemn harmony, Thy well-loved image comes and walks by me. I seem to hold thee by the gentle hand And talk of things I dimly understand, That thy dear spirit set to mine may be As to an intricate lock the simple key.

I saw thee in a vision of the night Transfigured; for it seemed that on thy brows The heavens did rest with all their stars, like boughs Laden with blossoms; round thy feet the bright Green waves, like grass, ran rippling, strewn with white Star-fragments of rent petals: wasted vows, And ruined prayers I thought them, such as house In hearts that love and are not loved aright.

Nothing but a speck we seem In the waste of waters round, Floating, floating like a dream, - Outward bound.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out ... and perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act...The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach.

Listen. With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees And fall.

Then saith the prophet and slave of the beauteous one: Who am I, and what shall be the sign? So she answered him, bending down, a lambent flame of blue, all-touching, all penetrant, her lovely hands upon the black earth, & her lithe body arched for love, and her soft feet not hurting the little flowers: Thou knowest! And the sign shall be my ecstasy, the consciousness of the continuity of existence, the omnipresence of my body.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. (1451b6)

Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him. (1455a33)

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully. (1460a19)

I saw clearly only when I saw with love. Or can one ever remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume. And that's the truth of roses, isn't it? - The perfume?

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

Klopstock was questioned regarding the meaningof a passage in his poem. He replied, 'God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows.'

Poets serious about making careers in institutions understand that the criteria for success are primarily quantitative. They must publish as much as possible as quickly as possible. The slow maturation of genuine creativity looks like laziness to a committee. Wallace Stevens was forty-three when his first book appeared. Robert Frost was thirty-nine. Today these sluggards would be unemployable.

From perfect grief there need not be Wisdom or even memory; One thing then learned remains to me - The woodspurge has a cup of three.

Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry. I who don't know the secret wrote the line.

All poets who, when reading from their own works, experience a choked feeling, are major. For that matter, all poets who read from their own works are major, whether they choke or not.

Your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy. Easy? Of course-you paint flowers and girls and sunsets; things that everybody understands. I never met him. Who? Everybody. Did you ever hear of nonrepresentational painting? I am. Pardon me? I am a painter, and painting is nonrepresentational. Not all painting. No: housepainting is representational. And what does a housepainter represent? Ten dollars an hour. In other words, you don't want to be serious- It takes two to be serious.

And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view.

Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore, That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, The weary, wayworn wanderer bore To his own native shore. On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome.

In the greenest of our valleys By good angels tenanted, Once a fair and stately palace - Radiant palace - reared its head.

While, like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever And laugh - but smile no more.

Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells.

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee; - And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me.

I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, 'a long poem,' is simply a flat contradiction in terms. I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length.