Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act… The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach.
Poetry Quotes
Thomson had a true poetical genius, the power of viewing every thing in a poetical light. His fault is such a cloud of words sometimes, that the sense can hardly peep through. Shiels, who compiled ‘Cibber’s Lives of the Poets,’ was one day sitting with me. I took down Thomson, and read aloud a large […]
Sad is the lot, who, once at least in his life, had not been a poet.
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even can enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.
You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
Do not ever read books about versification: no poet ever learnt it that way. If you are going to be a poet, it will come to you naturally and you will pick up all you need from reading poetry.
You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.
I am not sure, once a poet has found out what has been written already, and how it was written – once, in short, he has learnt his trade – that he should bother with literature at all. Poetry is not like surgery, a technique that can be copied. Every operation the poet performs is […]
