Poetry Quotes - Page 36

That which moveth the heart most is the best poetry; it comes nearest unto God, the source of all power.

Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself.

That the mere matter of a poem, for instance--its subject, its given incidents or situation; that the mere matter of a picture--the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape--should be nothing without the form, the spirit of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter;Mthis is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.

At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer or Shakspeare. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd

Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.

Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.

You know that the nucleus of a time is not The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins Nor stand there making orotund consolations. He shares the confusions of intelligence.

Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.

Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

All poetry is experimental poetry.

The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?

You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.

With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse

Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.

poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of the world we carry within us.

Poetry absolves spirituality from the dividedness of religions and provides us with a sanctuary that excludes no one.

Poetry isn't an activity, it's a way life is lived.

Poetry is a subset of a Cosmos, which in itself, is a poem.

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

For Mallarmé naming an object meant suppressing three-quarters of its poetic pleasure (which consists in the joy of guessing bit by bit - "le suggérer, voilà le rêve!").

The truth, I am convinced, is that there is no longer a poetical audience among the higher class of minds, that moral, political, and physical science have entirely withdrawn from poetry the attention of all whose attention is worth having; and that the poetical reading public being composed of the mere dregs of the intellectual community, the most sufficing passport to their favour must rest on the mixture of a little easily-intelligible portion of mawkish sentiment with an absolute negation of reason and knowledge.

Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.