Poetry is the bill and coo of sex.
Poetry Quotes
Words become luminous when the poet’s finger has passed over them its phosphorescence.
Most of us, I suspect, would advise a mediocre poet, if he must translate, to avoid the greater originals and choose the less, as if these would be easier. But this is probably a mistake. The great poets have so much wealth that even if you lose two-thirds of it on the voyage home you […]
In the hands of genius, the driest stick becomes an Aaron’s rod, and buds and blossoms out in poetry. Is he a Burns? The sight of a mountain daisy unseals the fountains of his nature, and he embalms the “bonny gem” in the beauty of his spirit. Is he a Wordsworth? At his touch all […]
Inside every man there is a poet who died young.
All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal.
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.
I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horror of sordid passion and – if he is lucky enough – know the love of an honest woman.
When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
