Poetry Quotes

Laureate, adj. Crowned with leaves of the laurel. In England the Poet Laureate is an officer of the sovereign’s court, acting as dancing skeleton at every royal feast and singing-mute at every royal funeral.

For wheresoe’er I turn my ravish’d eyes, Gay gilded scenes and shining prospects rise, Poetic fields encompass me around, And still I seem to tread on classic ground.

I think that poetry is fundamentally frivolity. I do it because I like it. The only serious thing is loving God and your neighbor. Because you can say, “I’m not a mathematician,” or “I’m not an artist, and that’s all right because I have no talent for it.” Everything that isn’t required of you is […]

Talent is like a faucet; while it is open, you have to write. – A hoax fabricated by poets for their self-importance.

Poets live in dreams and die in hunger.

God thinks within geniuses, dreams within poets, and sleeps within the rest of us.

Histories make men wise, poets witty; the mathematics subtle, natural philosophy deep; moral grave, logic and rhetoric able to contend.

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience; which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.

It is also clear that the poet’s job is not to report what has happened, but what is likely to happen: that is, what is capable of happening according to the laws of probability and necessity… the historian talks of what has happened, the poet of the kind of thing that can happen. For this […]