Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of nature of universals, whereas those of history are of singulars.
Poetry Quotes
You can live three days without bread – without poetry, never – you need art. Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal. You understand its function , you gentlemen of the bourgeoisie – whether lawgivers or […]
It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
When Elizabeth Bishop agreed to teach a poetry workshop for the first time (1966), she was dismayed. Her students didn’t know anything but the urge to “discover” or “express” themselves. So she sat them difficult metrical exercises, insisting: “You should have your head filled with poems all the time, until they almost get in your […]
(Poetry) a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.
By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.
It’s a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
The artist, depicting man disdainful of the storm and stress of life, is no less reconciling and healing than the poet who, while endowing Nature and Humanity, rejoices in its measureless superiority to human passions and human sorrows.
The girl whose boy-friend starts writing her love poems should be on guard.
To be a wit, intelligence is enough; to be a poet takes imagination.
