Poetry Quotes - Page 29

• I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Political, Moral, Subordinates

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1840). “Journal of a six weeks' tour. Letters from Geneva. Journal at Geneva: ghost stories, Journal: return to England. Letters from Italy”, p.129

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• A poem round and perfect as a star.

  Alexander Smith

  Stars, Perfect, Rounds

  alexander smith (1853). “poems”, p.33

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• Old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good.

  Izaak Walton

  Old Fashioned

  Izaak Walton (1825). “The Complete Angler; Or, Comtemplative Man's Recreation: With Lives of the Authors, and Notes”, p.126

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• Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul.

  Henrik Ibsen

  Soul, Judgment, Poetry Is

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• Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Moving, Inspiration, Writing

  A Defence of Poetry (written 1821) See Auden 22; Auden 39; Andrew Fletcher 1; Samuel Johnson 22; Twain 104

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• I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman.

  Robert Graves

  Believe, Passion, Lucky

  Lecture at Oxford. Time, December 15, 1961.

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• It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.

  Randall Jarrell

  Believe, Poet, Hard

  Randall Jarrell, Mary Jarrell (1985). “Randall Jarrell's letters: an autobiographical and literary selection”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

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• Everybody has their own idea of what's a poet. Robert Frost, President Johnson, T.S.Eliot, Rudolf Valentino - they're all poets. I like to think of myself as the one who carries the light bulb.

  Bob Dylan

  Thinking, Light, Ideas

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• In this poor body, composed of one hundred bones and nine openings, is something called spirit, a flimsy curtain swept this way and that by the slightest breeze. It is spirit, such as it is, which led me to poetry, at first little more than a pastime, then the full business of my life. There have been times when my spirit, so dejected, almost gave up the quest, other times when it was proud, triumphant. So it has been from the very start, never finding peace with itself, always doubting the worth of what it makes.

  Matsuo Basho

  Writing, Doubt, Littles

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• The poetry is the Earth, charming; The river, flowing from lofty mountains; Nature, a young woman and a heavenly plant with blossoming flowers, slinking in the garden of the mind.

  Manmohan Acharya

  Flower, Garden, Rivers

  "Song of the Bumblebee". Book by Manmohan Acharya, 2008.

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• A picture is a poem without words

  Horace

  Inspirational, Life, Art

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• Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Pain, Silence, Silent

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2415, Delphi Classics

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• In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Love, Men, Ego

  Charles Baudelaire, Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden (2006). “Intimate Journals”, p.95, Courier Corporation

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• Poetry is the tunnel at the end of the light.

  J. Patrick Lewis

  Tunnels, Light, Ends

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• But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat.

  Molly Haskell

  Love, Art, Order

  Molly Haskell (2016). “From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Third Edition”, p.27, University of Chicago Press

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• The field is a halfway house, halfway between the detail of those intimately known places and the ignorance of a landscape view ... The essence of a field is that the cultural accommodates the natural there. The human being makes room for and makes use of those organisms that are not him. In that way the field is a poem to symbiosis, and a human contract with the natural.

  Adam Nicolson

  Ignorance, Views, Essence

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• I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

  Anthony Hope

  Ignorance, Wish, Littles

  Dolly Dialogues (1894) no. 22

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• No time for poetry but exactly what is.

  Jack Kerouac

  Crafts

  Jack Kerouac, Ann Charters (1996). “Selected letters, 1940-1956”, Penguin Paperbacks

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• It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound-that he will never get over it.

  Robert Frost

  Reading, Taken, Writing

  Recalled on his death, 29 Jan 1963.

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• Let first the onion flourish there,
  Rose among roots, the maiden-fair,
  Wine-scented and poetic soul
  Of the capacious salad bowl.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Wine, Roots, Rose

  Robert Louis Stevenson (2015). “The Complete Poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Child's Garden of Verses, Underwoods, Songs of Travel, Ballads and Other Poems by a prolific Scottish writer, author of Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped”, p.186, e-artnow

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• It is not the poet's business to save man's soul but to make it worth saving . . . However, few poets have written with a clear theory of art for art's sake, it is by that theory alone that their work has been, or can be, judged; -and rightly so if we remember that art embraces all life and all humanity, and sees in the temporary and fleeting doctrines of conservative or revolutionary only the human grandeur or passion that inspires them.

  James Elroy Flecker

  Art, Passion, Men

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• I believe that if I should die, and you were to walk near my grave, from the very depths of the earth I would hear your footsteps.

  Benito Perez Galdos

  Love, Sad, Believe

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• There will be miracles After the last war is won Science and poetry rule in the new world to come Prophets and angels Gave us the power to see What an amazing future there will be

  Billy Joel

  War, Future, Angel

  Song: Two Thousand Years, Album: River of Dreams, 1993

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• When the tea is brought at five o'clock
  And all the neat curtains are drawn with care,
  The little black cat with bright green eyes
  Is suddenly purring there.

  Harold Monro

  Cat, Eye, Tea

  Children of Love (1914) "Milk for the Cat"

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• You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble

  Charles Olson

  People, Trying, Helping

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