By the way, I heard an answer today to the platitude: ‘There’s no money in poetry.’ It was: ‘There’s no poetry in money, either.’
Poetry Quotes
I am sorry to hear you are going to publish a poem. Can’t you suppress it? (Remark to Lord Porchester)
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.
If I thought that any poem of mine could have been written by anyone else, either a contemporary or a forerunner, I should suppress it with a blush; and I should do the same if I ever found I were imitating myself. Every poem should be new, unexpected, inimitable, and incapable of being parodied.
An artist that works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who molds his thoughts in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody’s use, and glorify them by his handling.
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
Good poets write poems that correspond with how they themselves talk; or, at least, how they would talk if they had the perfect gift of extemporary speech; they avoid inversions, oddities and rhetoric, and coin a striking phrase only when it is forced from them. If a poet, called upon to read his poems, chants […]
