Poetry Quotes

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.

Souls of Poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?

Poetry is no more, no less than a mosaic of words, so great exactness is required for each one.

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 …

Alas, tears are the poet's heritage!

He was, if ever there was one, an inspired poet. I do not think it the highest sort of poet. And you never discover who is an inspired poet until the inspiration goes.

Lo, this great work, a Temple to thy praise, On polisht Pillars of strong Verse I raise! A Temple, where if Thou vouchsafe to dwell, It Solomons, and Herods shall excel. Too long the Muses-Land have Heathen bin; Their Gods too long were …

A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests.

If some gentlemen are resolved that blank verse shall be prose, they have my free leave to enjoy their saying, provided I may have theirs to think they mean nothing by it, unless they can prove that rhyme is essential to metre; …

How many paltry, foolish, painted things, That now in coaches trouble every street, Shall be forgotten, whom no Poet sings, Ere they be well wrapt in their winding-sheet! Where I to thee eternity shall give, When nothing else remaineth of …

Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.

Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it — the poets and novelists — can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does no exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma — a mirage.

A gentleman reading a poem that began withWhere is that man that never yet did hear Of fair Penelope, Ulysses' queen?[Jonson] calling his cook, asked if he had ever heard of her, who answering "No," demonstrate to him Lo, there the man …

I would not be like those Authors, who forgive themselves some particular lines for the sake of a whole Poem, and vice versa a whole Poem for the sake of some particular lines. I believe no one qualification is so likely to make a good …

Æschylus is above all things the poet of righteousness.

The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, — the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made.

Whereas if the heart be moved, Although the verse be somewhat scant, God doth supply the want.

When you shall say, "As others do, so will I. I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season." — then dies the man in you; …

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

It is America's opportunity to lay the foundations for a new flowering of English verse, and to lay them as broad as they are strong.

There is no species of poetry which is better adapted to the taste of a melancholy man than a sonnet. Its brevity precludes the possibility of it becoming tiresome.

In all great poetry there is a kind of “kenosis” of the understanding, a self-emptying of the tongue. Here language points away from itself to something greater than itself.

The poet...nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.

The most generous of critics, if he is to be discriminating and just, cannot, let me say again, allow that any verse which is profoundly obscure or utterly unmusical, no matter how intellectual in substance, deserves the appellation of …