A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
Poetry Quotes
If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.
Next to being a great poet, is the power of understanding one.
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can’t read any poetry.
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.
Glorious indeed is the world of God around us, but more glorious the world of God within us. There lies the Land of a Song; there lies the poet’s native land.
Formerly, people believed that the sugar cane alone yielded sugar; nowadays it is extracted from almost anything. It is the same with poetry. Let us draw it, no matter whence, for it lies everywhere, and in all things.
A Poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.
Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don’t let them go, don’t publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.
If I were a literary Pope sending out an Encyclical, I would tell these inexperienced young persons (who have literary aspirations) that nothing is so frequent as to mistake an ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment… Nobody except editors and school teachers and here and there a literary man knows how common […]
