Poetry Quotes — page 11

All for myself the sigh would swell, The tear of anguish start; I little knew what wilder woe Had filled the Poet's heart.I did not know the nights of gloom, The days of misery; The long, long years of dark despair,

Nothing is easier than to falsify the past. Lifeless instruction will do it. If you rob it of vitality, stiffen it with pedantry, sophisticate it with argument, chill it with unsympathetic comment, you render it as dead as any academic …

Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This …

You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.

I am two fools, I know, For loving, and for saying so In whining poetry.

Take Christian morality: what other teaching could have had more hold on minds than that spoken in the name of a crucified God, and could have acted with all its mystical force, all its poetry of martyrdom, its grandeur in forgiving …

Incompossible, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both — as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man.

How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? Or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their …

Your settlement may be at hand; But that it is still at some distance is more likely. The French may be yet to go through more transmigrations. They may pass, as one of our Poets says, “thro' many varieties of untried being,” before their …

My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.

The poetry of earth is never dead.

The prose writer drags meaning along with a rope, the poet makes it stand out and hit you.

There neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified — more supremely noble than this very poem — this poem per se — this poem which is a poem and nothing more — this poem written solely for the poem's sake.

For his was now the loveliest part Of the young poet's life, when first, In solitude and silence nurst, His genius rises like a spring Unnoticed in its wandering; Ere winter cloud or summer ray

The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.

I sing the Man who Judahs Scepter bore In that right hand which held the Crook before; Who from best Poet, best of Kings did grow; The two chief gifts Heav'n could on Man bestow.

A Heroick Poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest Work which the Soul of Man is capable to perform.

He who says he values no translation of this or that poem because he understands the original, has indeed no true relish, that is, in effect, no true understanding of either.

When Time shall turn those amber locks to grey, My verse again shall gild and make them gay.

The ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of …

For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, …

Rhyme, the rack of finest wits, That expresseth but by fits, True conceit, Spoiling senses of their treasure, Cozening judgement with a measure, But false weight.

I think a good deal may be said to extenuate the fault of bad Poets. What we call a Genius, is hard to be distinguish'd by a man himself, from a strong inclination: and if his genius be ever so great, he can not at first discover it any …

The tadpole poet will never grow into anything bigger than a frog; not though in that stage of development he should puff and blow himself till he bursts with windy adulation at the heels of the laureled ox.