Quotes about Poetry

Love the earth and sun and animals, Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, Stand up for the stupid and crazy, Devote your income and labor to others... And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul, There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

But a cluster containing night's darkness and blood-dripping wounds, And psalms of the dead.

The great poets are to be known by the absence in them of tricks, and by the justification of perfect personal candor. All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.

Of all races and eras these States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets, and are to have the greatest, and use them the greatest, Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.

but love is not fashionable anymore, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about it that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. I remember myself once-but no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past.

Tread Lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow.

The arts that have escaped [uniformity] best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.

By the way, is there any difference between 'grey' and 'gray'? I believe there is, but I don't know what it is. In one place in the poem Smithers suggests 'gray'. In others he leaves 'grey'. Perhaps he is seeing red. I believe they are sympathetic colours in spectroscope investigations.

Poetry reaches to the realm beyond the world of sight and sound to reveal what our senses long to see and hear. It is the language not so much of the sublime, but of the truly real.

I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.