Quotes about Poetry

The train ran out into a steep green meadow and Jacob saw striped tulips growing and heard a bird singing, in Italy. There were trees laced together with vines - as Virgil said. Virgil's bees had gone about the plains of Lombardy. It was the custom of the ancients to train vines between elms. Then at Milan there were sharp-winged hawks, of a bright brown, cutting figures over the roofs.

The very reason why that poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now.

In the vast catastrophe of the European war our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction.

A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words. Some poems took years to find their words.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.

We are God's art. We are God's poem, created to display His beauty and goodness.

True poets lead no one unawares. It is nothing other than awareness that poets-that is, creators of all sorts-seek. They do not display their art so as to make it appear real; they display the real in a way that reveals it to be art.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play. I tell you Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.

The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.

Your very flesh shall be a great poem...