By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.
Poetry Quotes
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.
The great poems, Shakespeare’s included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common man, the life-blood of democracy.
But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declaim or explain, it presents.
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
The truest and greatest Poetry, (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough) can never again, in the English language, be express’d in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion.
She could never forget that the man she loved was a man with a past. He had been a poet. Deep down in her soul there was the corroding fear lest any moment a particularly fine sunset or the sight of a rose in bud might undo all the work she had done, sending Rodney […]
