John Keats Quotes About Poetry

Quotes about: Poetry

• I have so much of you in my heart.

  John Keats

  Love, Romantic, Heart

  John Keats (2009). “Selected Letters of John Keats: Revised Edition”, p.313, Harvard University Press

• Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

  John Keats

  Friendship, Summer, Running

  John Keats, Helen Vendler (1990). “Poetry Manuscripts at Harvard”, p.222, Harvard University Press

• The poetry of the earth is never dead.

  John Keats

  Inspirational, Life, Nature

• A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.

  John Keats

  Lakes, Water, Poetry

• Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

  John Keats

  Writing, Poetry, Soul

  Letter to J. H. Reynolds, 3 February 1818, in H. E. Rollins (ed.) 'The Letters of John Keats' (1958) vol. 1, p. 224

• They swayed about upon a rocking horse, And thought it Pegasus.

  John Keats

  Horse, Poetry, Pegasus

  'Sleep and Poetry' (1817) l. 186

• A drainless shower
  Of light is poesy: 'tis the supreme of power;
  'Tis might half slumbering on its own right arm.

  John Keats

  Light, Poetry, Half

  John Keats, Baron Richard Monckton Milnes Houghton (1848). “Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats”, p.26

• The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man; it cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself.

  John Keats

  Men, Law, Work Out

  John Keats (2015). “John Keats - The Man Behind The Lyrics: Life, letters, and literary remains: Complete Letters and Two Extensive Biographies of one of the most beloved English Romantic poets”, p.226, e-artnow

• Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

  John Keats

  Inspirational, Reading Poetry, Remembrance

  Letter to John Taylor, 27 February 1818, in H. E. Rollins (ed.) 'The Letters of John Keats' (1958) vol. 1, p. 238

• 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.

  John Keats

  Stars, Long, Imagination

  Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 8 October 1817, in H. E. Rollins (ed.) 'The Letters of John Keats' (1958) vol. 1, p. 170

• A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.

  John Keats

  Poetry, Identity, Literature

  John Keats (1994). “The Works of John Keats: With an Introduction and Bibliography”, p.9, Wordsworth Editions

• Sweet are the pleasures that to verse belong,
  And doubly sweet a brotherhood in song.

  John Keats

  Song, Sweet, Poetry

  'To George Felton Mathew' (1817) l. 1

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