Quotes on Poetry

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

You I am sure will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and 'load every rift' of your subject with ore.

Poetry fettered fetters the human race.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

There is a pleasure in poetic pains / Which only poets know.

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

For poetry, he's past his prime,_x000D_ _x000D_ He takes an hour to find a rhyme;_x000D_ _x000D_ His fire is out, his wit decayed,_x000D_ _x000D_ His fancy sunk, his muse a jade._x000D_ _x000D_ I'd have him throw away his pen,_x000D_ _x000D_ But there's no talking to some men.

. . . it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are-until the poem-nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.

Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.

Poetry is the only life got, the only work done, the only pure product and free labor of man, performed only when he has put all the world under his feet, and conquered the last of his foes.

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

Writing poetry is a state of free float.

I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn't come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ahhh." That was the first poem.

But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.