Quotes about Poetry

The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that in history, social studies or the art of fiction.

A true sonnet goes eight lines and then takes a turn for better or worse and goes six or eight lines more.

A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the Polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.

Pare down to the essence, but don't remove poetry. Keep things clean and unencumbered, buut don't sterilize.

She has been better educated than her sister, and has a more receptive mind. It seems as though someone had sown in a bare field a sprinkling of history, poetry, and pictures, and every seed had shot up in a flowery tangle.

What is originality in art? Perhaps it is easier to define what it is not and this may be done by saying that it is never a willful rejection of what has been accepted as the necessary laws of various forms of art. Thus in reasoning originality relies not in discarding the necessary laws of thought, but in using them to express new intellectual conceptions. In poetry originality consists not in discarding the necessary laws of rhythm but in finding new rhythms within the limits of those laws.

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

I believe God is a poet; every religion in our history was made of poems and songs, and not a few of them had books attached.

Poetry and language are often at the heartbeat of movements for change.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

A lot of the shadow self is the home of poetry, story, prayer. My deepest understandings are often released from the part of me of which I am least aware most of the time.

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:England hath need of thee: she is a fenOf stagnant waters.