There, by the starlit fences The wanderer halts and hears My soul that lingers sighing About the glimmering weirs.
A. E. HousmanRead
I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The essence of poetry is elusive and cannot be easily defined, much like a dog instinctively recognizing a rat without being able to articulate it.
This quote suggests that poetry, much like instinctual understanding, resists formal definition. A. E. Housman compares the difficulty of defining poetry to a terrier's innate ability to find a rat; both are rooted in deeper, instinctual comprehension rather than straightforward explanation.
Themes
PoetryDefinitionInstinctArtLanguage
In practice
Example use cases
In a literary discussion about the nature of art, this quote illustrates the intangibility of artistic expression.
More from A. E. Housman
All quotes βWho made the world I cannot tell; 'Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed.
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I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
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Lovers lying two and two Ask not whom they sleep beside, And the bridegroom all night through Never turns him to the bride.
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And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.
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Oh, 'tis jesting, dancing, drinking_x000D_ _x000D_ Spins the heavy world around.
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