Poetry Quotes — page 2

Love is a boy by poets styl'd; Then spare the rod and spoil the child.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.

From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics, compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness, a system in which the two great commandments were, to hate your neighbour, and to love your neighbour's wife.

I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only …

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.

What is new poetry? The difference is not mere details of form, measure rhyme schemes or diction, but a return to contemporary speech, thought, imagination and spiritual life, coupled with oriental (Japan & China) and cosmopolitan …

On Whitman - His poetry refreshed me like harsh salt spray.

Because he had seen much of life, his last and greatest work, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, is more than a collection of facts: it is a book of wisdom and experience, a treatise on the conduct of life, a commentary on human …

The poem you sent me was as fiery and virile as anything you’ve ever written – or anybody else, for that matter. Especially the second part went to my brain like the flaming liquor of insanity. No one else besides Jack London has the power …

I wish it were not customary to write of one art in the terms of another, and I use the words "music" and "musical" under protest, because the world has been so delighted to call any verse pleasant to the ear "musical," that it has not …

Poet, Singer, Great Heart, May our God bless your name, And the womb that held you, and the breasts that gave you milk. And may God forgive us all.

None knows the reason why this curse Was sent on him, this love of making verse.

the true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And, the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and …

The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.

Ornate rhetoric thought out of the rule of Plato... To which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less subtle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.

I write it out in a verse— MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly:

Poets are never young, in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them. A moment's insight is sometimes worth a …

To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet.

We such clusters had As made us nobly wild, not mad; And yet each verse of thine Out-did the meat, out-did the frolic wine.

Round and round, like a dance of snow In a dazzling drift, as its guardians, go Floating the women faded for ages, Sculptured in stone on the poet's pages.

The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong; They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

The pessimist writes over the gates of life what the poet has inscribed on the portals of hell—”Abandon hope, ye who enter here.”

So was their meaning to her words. No sword Of wrath her right arm whirl'd, But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word She shook the world.