poetry quotes
The theme of Death is to Poetry what Mistaken Identity is to Drama.
No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there.
Poetry is music written for the human voice.
Nothing has raised more questioning among my critics thanthese wordsnoble, thegrand style Ithink it will be found that the grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
In poetry, no less than in life, he is 'a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain'.
More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.
The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden,Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.
Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.
There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
You were silly like us: your gift survived it all; 40 The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen.
Earth receive an honoured guest; WilliamYeats is laid to rest: Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand.
Nos beaux sentiments ne sont-ils pas les poe sies de la volonte ? Aren't our best feelings poetry of the will?
Il est l'heure de s'enivrer! Pour n'e" tre pas les esclaves martyrise s duTemps, enivrez-vous sans cesse! De vin, de poe sie ou de vertu, a' votre guise. This is the time for drunkenness! Be not the martyred slaves of Time, drink without stopping! Drink wine, poetry, or virtue, as you please.
Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.
Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end.Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.
My girls suffered during this month or so, so did my seminars & lectures & my poetry even. To be a critic, ah, how deeper and more scientific.
Mastery in poetry consists largely in the instinct for not ruining or smothering or tinkering with moments of vision.
Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.
Clear Cymric voices carry well this Autumn night, Aneurin and Taliesin, cruel owls for whom it is never altogether dark before the rules made poetry a pedant's game.
She that with poetry is won Is but a desk to write upon.
Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry.
Can we not force from widowed poetry, Now thou art dead, great Donne, one elegy To crown thy hearse?
'I can repeat poetryas well as other folk if it comes to that' 'Oh, it needn't come to that!'Alice hastily said.
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
Soy el cantor deAme rica auto ctono y salvaje; mi lira tiene un alma, mi canto un ideal. Mi verso no se mece colgado de un ramaje con un vaive n pausado de hamaca tropical. I am the aboriginal and savage singer of America; my lyre has a soul, my song has an ideal. My poetry does not swing from the branches with the slow movement of a tropical hammock.
Prose = words in their best order;poetry = the best words in the best order.
Such were the numbers which could call The stones into theTheban wall. Such miracles are ceased, and now we see No towns or houses raised by poetry.
Commitment seems to live more in the poetry of our aspirations than in the prose of the realities we have created.
Si hay poes|a en nuestra Ame rica, ella esta en las cosas viejas: en Palenke y Uatla n, en el indio legendario y el inca sensual y fino y en el gran Moctezuma de la silla de oro. Lo dema s es tuyo, demo crataWaltWhitman. If there is poetry in our America, it is in ancient items: in Palenke and Uatla n, in the legendary Indian and in the sensuous and elegant Inca and the great Moctezuma. The rest is yours, democratic Walt Whitman.
Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin'day, or Warren's blackin', or Rowland's oil, or some o'them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.
La poe sie veutquelque chose d'e norme, debarbare et de sauvage. Poetry needs something on the scale of the grand, the barbarous, the savage.
I am two fools, I know, For loving, and for saying so In whining poetry.
All good poetry is forged slowlyand patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.
First I protest, beau schiris, by your leif Beis weill adivisit my werk or ye reprief; Consider it warely, read ofter than anis, Weill, at ane blenk, slee poetry nocht ta'en is.
So poetry, which is in Oxford made An art, in London only is a trade.
We canonlysay that helived intheinfancyofour poetry, and that nothing is brought to perfection at the first.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.
All great poetry gives the illusion of a view of life.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
Poetry is not a career, but a mug's game.
Poetrytriestotell you about a vision intheunvisionary language of farm, city and love.
Poetry in a bottle.
Poetry's a mere drug, Sir.
English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.
There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.
Poetryisnotanexpressionofthepartyline.It'sthattimeof night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
DerAberglaube ist die Poesie des Lebens. Superstition is the poetry of life.
The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here todayin next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumpedalways somebody else's horizon!
The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.
If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.
The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.
I have always disliked the idea of an arts ghetto in which poetry is kept on a life-support system.
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. 416
Le but de l'art est presque divin: ressusciter, s'il fait de l'histoire; cre er, s'il fait de la poe sie. The goal of art is almost divine: to resuscitate, if it concerns history; to create, if it concerns poetry.
There Poetry shall tune her sacred voice, And wake from ignorance the WesternWorld.
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.
Poetry in this latter age hath proved but a mean mistress to such as have whollyaddicted themselves to her, or given their names up to her family. They who have but saluted her on the by, and now and then tendered their visits, she hath done much for, and advanced in the way of their own professions (both the law and the gospel) beyond all they could have hoped, or done for themselves without her favour.
Charlie Parkeralways filled me with a kind of despair, because he played the way I would have liked to write, and this wasn't possible for me or anyone else. He made poetry seem word-bound.
A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the Polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.
If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations.When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence.When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry: on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
La poe sie doit e" tre faite par tous. Non par un. Pauvre Hugo! Poetry should be composed by everyone. Not by one. Poor Hugo!
Nothing is more difficult than to determine what a child takes in, and does not take in, of its environment and its teaching. This fact is brought home to me by the hymns which I learned as a child, and never forgot. They mean more to me almost than the finest poetry, and they have for me a more permanent value, somehow or other.
Poetry can communicate the actual quality of experience with a subtletyand precision unapproachable by any other means.
The Sitwellsbelong tothehistoryof publicity rather than of poetry.
Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen.
Pergo Park knew me, and Clavering, and Havering- atte-Bower, Stanford Rivers lost me in osier-beds, Stapleford Abbots sent me safe home on the dark road after Simeon-quiet evensong, Wanstead drew me over and over into its basic poetry, in its serpentine lake I saw bass-viols among the golden dead leaves, through its trees the ghost of a great house.
His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April,1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetryand tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore.
The virtues common to good living and good poetry seem to me not so much matters of what used to be called 'virtue'as, above all, of sane vitality.
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
History, at least in its ideal state of perfection, is a compound of poetry and philosophy.
His writing bears the same relation to poetry which a Turkey carpet bears to a picture.
From the poetry of Lord Byron they drewa system of ethics, compounded of misanthropyand voluptuousness, a system in which the two great commandments were, to hate your neighbour, and to love your neighbour's wife.
Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
If the art of poetry isthe art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it's not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos.
Il n'y a que la Beaute et elle n'a qu'une expression parfaite, la Poe sie. There is only beautyand it has only one perfect expression, poetry.
La Poe sie est l'expression, par le langage humain ramene e a' son rythme essentiel, du sens myste rieux des aspects de l'existence; elle doue ainsi d'authenticite notre se jour et constitue la seule ta" che spirituelle. Poetry is an expression, through human language restored to its essential rhythm, of the mysteriousness of existence; it endows our life with authenticity and constitutes our only spiritual task.
We sing the love of danger.Courage, rashness, and rebellion are the elements of our poetry. Hitherto literature has tended to exalt thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and sleep, whereas we are for aggressive movement, febrile insomnia, mortal leaps, and blows with the fist.We proclaim that the world is richer for a new beautyof speed, and our praise isfor themanat the wheel. There is no beauty now save in struggle, no masterpiece can be anything but aggressive, and hence we glorify war, militarism and patriotism.
Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
The thing that makes poetry different from all of the otherarts[is] you're using language, which iswhat you use for everything elsetelling lies and selling socks, advertising, and conducting law. Whereas we don't write little concerts or paint little pictures.
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
Poetry is an extra hand. It can caress or tickle. It can clench and fight.
Poetry isthe honey of all flowers, the quintessence of all
I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants. SeeAuden 40:2.
Poetry happens because of life.Poetry happens because of language.And poetryhappensbecauseofotherpoets.
PoetryontheairsoundsliketheMusesinstripedtrousers.
Thisbook isnot about heroes.Englishpoetry isnot yet fit to speak of them.
Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry. The subject of it is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world.That'swhy it almost alwayshastobe onthesideof the underdog.
And he, whose fustian's so sublimely bad, It is not poetry, but prose run mad.
No good poetry is written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinksfrombooks, conventionand cliche ; and not from life.
Poetry must be as well written as prose.
Poetry must be read as music and not as oratory.
For three years, out of key with his time, He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain'the sublime' In the old sense.Wrong from the start No, hardly, but seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date.
The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs toofar from the dance; that poetry beginsto atrophy when it getstoo far from music . . .
Without contemplating last and late the true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.
Poetryis capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos.
La Poe sie ne rythmera plus l'action; elle sera en avant. Poetry will no longer keep step with theaction; it will be ahead of it.
L'amour est un jeu, la poe sie est unjeu, la vie doit devenir un jeu (c'est le seul espoir de nos luttes politiques) et 'la re volution elle-me" me est unjeu', comme disaient les plus conscients des re volutionnaires de mai. Love is a game, poetry is a game, life should become a game (it's the only hope for our political struggles) and 'the revolution itself is a game', as the most aware of the May revolutionaries said.
What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.
The greatest thing a humansoul everdoes in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one.
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.
Poetry, surely, is a crisis, perhaps the onlyactionable one we can call our own.
Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
The more rhymethere isin poetry the more dangerof its tricking the writer into something other than the urge in the beginning.
There is a formal poetry perfect only in formthe number of syllables, the designated and required stresses of accent, the rhymes if wantedthey come off with the skill of a solved crossword puzzle.
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.
Pure poetry is pure experimentmemorable nonsense.
Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong: They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetryadministers to the effect byacting on the cause.
Poetry is a record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
Ihave justcausetomakea pitiful defence of poor poetry, which from almost the highest estimation of learning is 790
And truly, even Plato, whosoever well considereth shall find that in the body of his work, though the inside and strength were philosophy, the skin as it were and beauty depended most on poetry.
Poetry therefore, is an art of imitation A speaking picture, with this end: to teach and delight.
Here they have no time for the fine graces of poetry, unless it freely grows in deep compulsion, like water in the well, woven into the texture of the soil in a strong pattern.
Everybody's got to reclaim these thingspoetry, rock'n'roll, political activismand it's got to be done over and over again. It's like eating: you can't say,'Oh, I ate yesterday'.You have to eat again.
Poetry cannot take sides except with life.
La poe sie est le langage naturel de tous les cultes. Poetry is the natural language of all religions.
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven.
Poetry is a means of redemption.
Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
All poetry is experimental poetry.
Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.
After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is the essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
Poetry is a rich, full-blooded whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbers the leaf, the duet of two nightingales, the sweet pea, that has run wild,Creation's tears in shoulder blades.
Money is a kind of poetry.
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
We don't get groupies.We get teenagers who want to read us their poetry.
The joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God.
A merely great intellect can produce great prose, but not poetry, not one line.
If you want a definition of poetry, say: 'Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing'and let it go at that.
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetryas hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.
Poetryis perfection's sweat but most seen as fresh as the raindrops on a statue's brow.
The fate of poetry isto fall in love with the world, in spite of History.
The process of poetry is one of excavation and of self- discovery.
Angling issomewhat like poetry, men areto be bornso: I mean with inclination to it.
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch.When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be classics, now it's lyric verse.
Books of poetry by young writersareusually promissory notes that are never met. Now and then, however, one comes across a volume that is so far above the average that one can hardly resist the fascinating temptation of recklessly prophesying a fine future for its author. Such a book Mr Yeats's Wanderings of Oisin certainly is. Here we find nobility of treatment and nobility of subject- matter, delicacy of poetic instinct and richness of imaginative resource.
Anything isgood material for poetry. Anything. 914
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.
Poetry in love is no more to be avoided than jealousy.
Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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