 |
 | "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." | |
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Paul Valery
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| "A poet must needs be before his own age, to be even with
posterity." | |
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James Russell Lowell
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| "A poet who reads his own verse in public may have other nasty
habits." | |
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Robert Anson Heinlein
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| "Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy
luggage through O"Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little
of it." | |
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Russell Baker
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| "Anyone may be an honorable man, and yet write verse badly." | |
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Jean Baptiste Moliére
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| "By poetry we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as to
produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of
words, what the painter does by means of colors." | |
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Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay
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| "Byron and Shelley and Keats Were a trio of lyrical treats." | |
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Dorothy Parker
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| "Do not kick against the pricks." | |
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Aeschylus
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| "Do you know, Considering the market, there are more Poems produced
than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more
businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid
of." | |
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Robert Frost
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| "Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me." | |
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Sigmund Freud
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| "Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep
watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my
memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.... The seat of
this sensation is the pit of the stomach." | |
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Alfred Edward Housman
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| "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." | |
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Joseph Addison
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| "Friends are born, not made." | |
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Henry B. Adams
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| "God hath treasures beneath the Throne, the keys whereof are the
tongues of poets." | |
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Prophet Muhammad
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| "He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in
laudable things ought himself to be a true poem." | |
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John Milton
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| "I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance
cramps my conversation." | |
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Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins
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| "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever
warm me, I know that is poetry." | |
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Emily Dickinson
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| "If there"s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in
money." | |
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Robert Ranke Graves
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| "If you want to make a song more hummy, add a few tiddely
poms." | |
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Alan Alexander Milne
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| "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be
understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in
poetry, it"s the exact opposite." | |
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Paul Dirac
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| "It is 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." | |
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Wystan Hugh Auden
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| "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably
every day for lack of what is found there." | |
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William Carlos Williams
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| "Just as I shall select my ship when I am about to go on a voyage, or
my house when I propose to take a residence, so I shall choose my death
when I am about to depart from life." | |
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Lucius Annaeus Seneca
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| "Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong: They learn in
suffering what they teach in song." | |
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Percy Bysshe Shelley
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| "My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages
and the thought of his own." | |
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Thomas Hardy:
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| "One merit of mathematics few will deny: it says more in fewer words
than any other science. The formula, e^iπ = -1 expressed a world of
thought, of truth, of poetry, and of the religious spirit "God eternally
geometrizes."" | |
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David Eugene Smith
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| "One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer
words than prose." | |
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Francois Voltaire
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| "One of the principal objects of theoretical research in my
department of knowledge is to find the point of view from which the
subject appears in its greatest simplicity." | |
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Josiah Willard Gibbs
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| "One of the principle objects of theoretical research in any
department of knowledge is to find the point of view from which the
subject appears in its greatest simplicity." | |
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J. W. Gibbs
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| "Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that
speaks." | |
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Plutarch
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| "Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks." | |
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Simonides of Ceos
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| "Poetry can communicate before it is understood." | |
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Thomas Stearns Eliot
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| "Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history." | |
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Plato
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| "Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes, and unveils the meaning of
all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the
secret rays of the universe, and restores to us forgotten
paradises." | |
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Dame Edith Sitwell
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| "Poetry is as exact a science as geometry." | |
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Gustave Flaubert
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| "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from
emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from
personality." | |
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T. S. Eliot
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| "Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than
history, since its statements are of the nature of universals, whereas
those of history are singulars." | |
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Aristotle
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| "Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real
toads." | |
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Marianne Craig Moore
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| "Poetry is the opening and closing of a door leaving those who look
through to guess about what is seen during a moment." | |
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Carl Sandburg
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| "Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully." | |
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Wallace Stevens
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| "Poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it
should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and
appear almost a remembrance." | |
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John Keats
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| "Poetry, my dear friends, is a sacred incarnation of a smile. Poetry
is a sigh that dries the tears. Poetry is a spirit who dwells in the soul,
whose nourishment is the heart, whose wine is affection. Poetry that comes
not in this form is a false messiah." | |
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Kahlil Gibran
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| "Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and
the truth of truths is love." | |
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Philip James Bailey
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| "Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese." | |
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Gilbert Keith Chesterton
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| "Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known
what they discreetly blot." | |
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Edmund Waller
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| "Prose - words in their best order; Poetry - the best words in their
best order." | |
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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| "Protest long enough that you are right, and you will be
wrong." | |
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Proverb
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| "Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the
Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo." | |
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Don Marquis
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| "RIMER, n. A poet regarded with indifference or disesteem." | |
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Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
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| "Sad is his lot, who, once at least in his life, has not been a
poet." | |
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Lamartine
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| "Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows, And the smooth stream
in smoother numbers flows; But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse rough verse should like the torrent roar. When Ajax strives
some rock"s vast weight to throw, The line too labours, and the words move
slow: Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o"er th" unbending
corn, and skims along the main." | |
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Alexander Pope
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| "Some good, some so-so, and lots plain bad: that"s how a book of
poems is made, my Friend." | |
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Marcus Valerius Martialis
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| "Talent is like a faucet; while it is open, you have to write." | |
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Jean Anouilh
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|
| "The fellow is either mad or he is composing verses. ?Aut insanit
homo, aut versus facit" | |
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Quintus Horatius Flaccus Horace
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|
| "The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see
something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can
talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.
To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion ? all in one." | |
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John Ruskin
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| "The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the
lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen"s beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet"s
eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth
to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown,
the poet"s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local
habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, That if it
would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or
in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a
bear!" | |
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William Shakespeare
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| "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." | |
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Henry David Thoreau
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|
| "The poets" scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius
survives; all else is claimed by death." | |
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Edmund Spenser
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| "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as
affectionately as he has absorbed it." | |
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Walt Whitman
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|
| "The vision and the faculty divine; Yet wanting the accomplishment of
verse." | |
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William Wordsworth
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| "The world is full of poetry.- The air is living with its spirit; and
the waves dance to the music of its melodies, And sparkle in its
brightness." | |
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James Percival
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|
| "The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being
misunderstood." | |
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Jean Cocteau
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|
| "There is no mistake so great as that of being always right." | |
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Samuel Butler, the Younger
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|
| "There is no mistake; there has been no mistake; and there shall be
no mistake." | |
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Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
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|
| "Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money. and in
its higher forms it is a kind of poetry." | |
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Henry Havelock Ellis
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|
| "Three poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England
did adorn. The first in loftiness of thought surpass"d; The next, in
majesty; in both the last. The force of Nature could no further go; To
make a third, she join"d the former two." | |
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John Dryden
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|
| "Two men look out through the same bars: One sees the mud, and one
the stars." | |
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Frederick Langbridge
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|
| "Ugliness is a point of view: an ulcer is wonderful to a
pathologist." | |
|
|
|
| "We all write poems; it is simply that the poets are the ones who
write in words." | |
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John Fowles
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| "We have all forgot more than we remember." | |
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Thomas Fuller
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|
| "We have had triumphs, we have made mistakes, we have had sex." | |
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George Herbert Walker Bush
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|
| "We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is
easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one." | |
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Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
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|
| "We have more than we use." | |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
|
|
| "What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds
for the noble emotions." | |
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John RUSKIN
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|
| "What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends
to destroy." | |
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Unknown
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|
| "Wine is bottled poetry." | |
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Robert Louis Stevenson
|
|
| "You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with
you." | |
|
Joseph Joubert
|