A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.
Poetry Quotes
Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.
While the poet entertains he continues to search for eternal truths, for the essence of being. In his own fashion he tries to solve the riddle of time and change, to find an answer to suffering, to reveal love in the very abyss of cruelty and injustice. Strange as these words may sound I often […]
Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
Few understand the works of Cummings, And few James Joyce’s mental slummings, And few young Auden’s coded chatter; But then it is the few that matter.
When I admit neglect of Gissing, The say ‘You don’t know what you’re missing’ Until their arguments are subtler I think I’ll stick with Samuel Butler
Means not, but blunders round about a meaning; And he whose fustian’s so sublimely bad, It is not poetry, but prose run mad.
It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at […]
On the works of Walter Savage Landor I am unfit to the write with candor. If you can read them, well and good But as for me, I never could.
But touch me, and no minister so sore; Whoever offends at some unlucky time Slides into verse, and hitches in a rhyme, Sacred to ridicule his whole life long, And the sad burden of some merry song.
