Poetry Quotes - Page 30

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. . . . Read it a hundred times; it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

If it doesn't work horizontally as prose... it probably won't work any better vertically pretending to be poetry.

Nor sequent centuries could hit Orbit and sum of SHAKSPEARE's wit. The men who lived with him became Poets, for the air was fame.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

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.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

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.

Every word was once a poem.

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.

All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially.

All the world can be found in poetry. All you need to see and hear. All the moments, good and bad, joyous and sad.

Poets arent very usefulBecause they aren't consumeful or produceful.

Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.

The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.

I am one of those who hold that poetry is never so blithe as in a wanton and irregular subject.

Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life.

Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative.

Rhyme and meter force gaps in meaning so the muse can enter.

Poetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.

The three ingredients of poetry: the mystery of the universe, spiritual curiosity, the energy of language.

Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.

Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know.

It is through beauty, poetry and visionary power that the world will be renewed.