Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you like music to the musician… or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.
Poetry Quotes
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better.
There are two classes of poets – the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.
The importance and endurance of poetry, as well as art, are its hold upon reality. We hear much, on this side and that, of realism. Well, we may let realism go, but cannot let go reality.
The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions. Dante’s is one of those that one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life.
The test of the poet is the power to take the passing day, with its news, its cares, its fears, as he shares them, and hold it up to a divine reason, till he sees it to have a purpose and beauty. Then the dry twig blossoms in his hand.
Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
Poetry’s unnat’ral; no man ever talked poetry ‘cept a beadle on boxin’ day.
Those who demand of poetry a day-dream, or a metamorphosis of their own feeble desires and lusts, or what they believe to be ‘intensity’ of passion, will not find much in Johnson. He is like Pope and Dryden, Crabbe and Landor, a poet for those who want poetry and not something else, some stay for […]
