Quotes about Poetry

The world is full of poetry; it is sin which turns it into prose.

Do not say we work to go to Heaven because we are mercenary. Does a man love a woman and ask for her hand because he is mercenary? I love poetry; there's no money in it.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

Once in a while, though, he went on binges. He would sneak into bookstores or libraries, lurk around the racks where the little magazines were kept; sometimes he'd buy one. Dead poets were his business, living ones his vice. Much of the stuff he read was crap and he knew it; still, it gave him an odd lift. Then there would be the occasional real poem, and he would catch his breath. Nothing else could drop him through space like that, then catch him; nothing else could peel him open.

The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. Alas, burthen, thine, cometh, aweary —the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the unhappy lovers—I could now see—faintly ridiculous, like poor moping Miss Violence herself. Soft-edged, blurry, soggy, like a bun fallen into the water. Nothing you'd want to touch

This is "poetry," this song of the wind across teeth, this message from the flayed tongue to the flayed ear.

Poems are made of words. They aren't boxes. They aren't houses. Nobody is in them, really.

There are three things, after all, that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart or the mind. It is the most important of all to reach the heart of the reader.

O for the gentleness of old Romance, the simple planning of a minstrel's song!

Let the mad poets say whate'er they pleaseOf the sweets of Fairies, Peris, Goddesses,Haunters of cavern, lake, and waterfall,As a real woman, lineal indeedFrom Pyrrha's pebbles or old Adam's seed.

The poetry of earth is never dead.

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity—it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance.