To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.
Poetry Quotes
To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.
For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibly, had also thought long and deeply. I have said that […]
Poetry too is nowadays a one-man job. It neither derives from declamatory nor contemplates its necessity. Poets don’t begin life as actors or elocutionists, and certainly actors and elocutionists do not commonly or normally take up poetic composition. Poetry, like prose writing, is not even recited at all for the most part. It is merely […]
The job of the poet is to render the world – to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.
What is a poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is expected of him? – He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has greater knowledge of human knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than […]
The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.
Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.
I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
