Anyone may be an honorable man, and yet write verse badly.
Poetry Quotes
Poets treat their experiences shamelessly; they exploit them.
Be not so set upon poetry, as to be always poring on the passionate and measured pages. Let not what should be sauce, rather than food for you, engross all your application. Beware of a boundless and sickly appetite for the reading of poems which the nation now swarms withal; and let not the Circaen […]
“Look into thy heart and write!” is good advice, but not if interpreted to mean, “Look nowhere else!” The poet should know his world and, so far as his art is concerned, any kind of battering from his world is better than his own self-indulgent brooding.
I care not one single curse for all the criticism that ever was canted or decanted, or recanted. Neither does the world. The world takes a poet as it finds him, and seats him above or below the salt. The world is as obstinate as a million mules, and will not turn its head on […]
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.
Thomson had a true poetical genius, the power of viewing every thing in a poetical light. His fault is such a cloud of words sometimes, that the sense can hardly peep through. Shiels, who compiled ‘Cibber’s Lives of the Poets,’ was one day sitting with me. I took down Thomson, and read aloud a large […]
Sad is the lot, who, once at least in his life, had not been a poet.
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even can enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.
