Inspirational Quotes on Poetry

“But dream not helm and harness The sign of valor true; Peace hath higher tests of manhood Than battle ever knew.”

“Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.”

“Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.”

“My prime of youth is but a frost of cares, My feast of joy is but a dish of pain, My crop of corn is but a field of tares, And all my good is but vain hope of gain: The day is past, and yet I saw no sun, And now I live, and now my life is done. My tale was heard and yet it was not told, My fruit is fall'n, and yet my leaves are green, My youth is spent and yet I am not old, I saw the world and yet I was not seen: My thread is cut and yet it is not spun, And now I live, and now my life is done. I sought my death, and found it in my womb, I looked for life, and saw it was a shade, I trod the earth, and knew it was my tomb, And now I die, and now I was but made, My glass is full, and now my glass is run, And now I live, and now my life is done.”

“All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words.”

“If we ask what poetry is we may say in general that it is a victory over the world; it is through a negation of the imperfect actuality that poetry opens up a higher actuality”

“Unconscionable Love, To what extremes will you not drive our hearts!”

“The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority.”

“But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history -- that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires.”

“Ulysses was not comely, but he was eloquent, Yet he fired two goddesses of the sea with love”

“Then answered her son, who turns the stars in the sky: 'What way art thou bending fate, Mother? What dost thou ask For these thy ships? May vessels built by the hands Of mortal men claim an immortal right? Is Aeneas to pass, sure of the outcome, through dangers When nothing is sure? To what god is such power allowed?”

“Annunciation Salvation to all that will is nigh; That All, which always is all everywhere, Which cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear, Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die, Lo, faithful virgin, yields Himself to lie In prison, in thy womb; and though He there Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He will wear, Taken from thence, flesh, which death's force may try. Ere by the spheres time was created, thou Wast in His mind, who is thy Son and Brother; Whom thou conceivst, conceived; yea thou art now Thy Maker's maker, and thy Father's mother; Thou hast light in dark, and shuts in little room, Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.”

“The grim lioness follows the wolf, the wolf himself the goat, the wanton goat the flowering clover, and Corydon follows you, Alexis. Each is led by his liking.”

“And let Apollo drive Prince Hector back to battle, breathe power back in his lungs, make him forget the pain that racks his heart. Let him whip the Achaeans in headlong panic rout and roll them back once more, tumbling back on the oar-swept ships of Peleus' son Achilles. And he, will launch his comrade Patroclus into action and glorious Hector will cut him down with a spear in front of Troy, once Patroclus has slaughtered whole battalions of strong young fighting men and among them all, my shining son Sarpedon. But then - enraged for Patroclus - brilliant Achilles will bring Prince Hector down. And then, from that day on, I'll turn the tide of war: back the fighting goes, no stopping it, ever.”

“...for poets, at least, experiencing something inexpressible does not mean silence. It's precisely the inexpressible something that poetry is meant to help us see or feel. If it were merely expressible - if there were nothing ineffable about it - there would be no need for a poem. But everywhere in the Bible we meet reality that exceeds our expectations.”

“I will complain, yet praise; I will bewail, approve: And all my sowre-sweet dayes I will lament, and love.”

“The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we have an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, like Cyrano de Bergerac, speaking in rhyme, it is not our language disguised or distorted, but our language rounded and made whole.”

“I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.”

“He hoped and feared,' continued Solon, in a low. mournful voice; 'but at times he was very miserable, because he did not think it possible that so much happiness was reserved for him as the love of this beautiful, innocent girl. At night, when he was in bed, and all the world was dreaming, he lay awake looking up at the old books against the walls, thinking how he could bring about the charming of her heart. One night, when he was thinking of this, he suddenly found himself in a beautiful country, where the light did not come from sun or moon or stars, but floated round and over and in everything like the atmosphere. On all sides he heard mysterious melodies sung by strangely musical voices. None of the features of the landscape was definite; yet when he looked on the vague harmonies of colour that melted one into another before his sight he was filled with a sense of inexplicable beauty. On every side of him fluttered radiant bodies, which darted to and fro through the illuminated space. They were not birds, yet they flew like birds; and as each one crossed the path of his vision he felt a strange delight flash through his brain, and straightaway an interior voice seemed to sing beneath the vaulted dome of his temples a verse containing some beautiful thought. Little fairies were all this time dancing and fluttering around him, perching on his head, on his shoulders, or balancing themselves on his fingertips. 'Where am I?' he asked. 'Ah, Solon?' he heard them whisper, in tones that sounded like the distant tinkling of silver bells, "this land is nameless; but those who tread its soil, and breathe its air, and gaze on its floating sparks of light, are poets forevermore.' Having said this, they vanished, and with them the beautiful indefinite land, and the flashing lights, and the illumined air; and the hunchback found himself again in bed, with the moonlight quivering on the floor, and the dusty books on their shelves, grim and mouldy as ever.' ("The Wondersmith")”

“The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read the.”