No poet sings because he must sing. At least no great poet does. A great poet sings because he chooses to sing.
Poetry Quotes
A poet is someone who is astonished by everything.
Poets are born, not made.
The tongue of a poet is always the last to be corrupted.
Good poets are like angels of Heaven.
He falsifies who renders a verse just as it looks.
Poetry, like chastity, can be carried to far.
Lowell was not a great grower – he was a builder. He ‘built’ poems; he didn’t put in the seed, and water the seed, and send down his sun – letting the rest take care of itself: he measured his poems – kept them within the formula.
Poetry avoids the last illusion of prose, which so gently sometimes and at others so passionately pretends that things are thus and thus. In poetry they are also thus and thus, but because the arrangement of the lines, the pattern within the whole, will have it so. Exquisitely leaning toward an implied untruth, prose persuades […]
My usual style of ciphering out the merits of poetry… is to read a line or two near the top, a verse near the bottom and then strike an average.
