Quotes about Poetry

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

Mordecai allowed a smile to play across his face. "I have little doubt this ploy will try your patience. You must present Sir Percival as a gallant knight well-versed in chivalry and a favored champion in the tourneys. Perhaps a bit of poetry would be in order as well." Dante rolled his eyes and sighed. "I shall be the very picture of chivalrous drivel.

I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

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.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

O night that joinedBeloved and loverLover into beloved transformed

The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.

The true notion is that the material universe is a sign or an indication of what God is. We look at the purity of the snowflake and we see something of the goodness of God. The world is full of poetry: it is sin which turns it into prose.

As, in the serious style, Homer is pre-eminent among poets, for he alone combined dramatic form with excellence of imitation, so he too first laid down the main lines of Comedy, by dramatising the ludicrous instead of writing personal satire.

and Euripides, faulty though he may be in the general management of his subject, yet is felt to be the most tragic of the poets.

If the poet's description be criticized as not true to fact, one may urge perhaps that the object ought to be as described—an answer like that of Sophocles, who said that he drew men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they were.

The reason for their original use of the trochaic tetrameter was that their poetry was satyric and more connected with dancing than it now is. As soon, however, as a spoken part came in, nature herself found the appropriate metre. The iambic, we know, is the most speakable of metres, as is shown by the fact that we very often fall into it in conversation, whereas we rarely talk hexameters, and only when we depart from the speaking tone of voice.