The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.
Poetry Quotes
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, 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 […]
Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what “must become.”… Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandoleer. And poets are the snipers.
The poet, whether in prose or verse, the creator, can only stamp his images forcibly on the page, in proportion, as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.
All men have poetry in their hearts, and it is necessary for them, as much as possible, to express their feelings. For this they must have a medium, moving and pliant, which can refreshingly become their own, age after age. All great languages undergo change. Those languages which resist the spirit of change are doomed […]
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
