Words become luminous when the poet’s finger has passed over them its phosphorescence.
Poetry Quotes
Most of us, I suspect, would advise a mediocre poet, if he must translate, to avoid the greater originals and choose the less, as if these would be easier. But this is probably a mistake. The great poets have so much wealth that even if you lose two-thirds of it on the voyage home you […]
In the hands of genius, the driest stick becomes an Aaron’s rod, and buds and blossoms out in poetry. Is he a Burns? The sight of a mountain daisy unseals the fountains of his nature, and he embalms the “bonny gem” in the beauty of his spirit. Is he a Wordsworth? At his touch all […]
Inside every man there is a poet who died young.
All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal.
A poet is seldom hard up for advice. The worst part of it all is that sometimes the advice is coming from other poets, and they ought to know better.
Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
As to the pure mind all things are pure, so to the poetic mind all things are poetical.
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.
