True poets should be chaste, I know, But wherefore should their lines be so?
Poetry Quotes
Poetry is not a career, but a mug game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written; he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
Rime, n. Agreeing sounds in the terminals of verse, mostly bad. The verses themselves, as distinguished from prose, mostly dull. Usually (and wickedly) spelled “rhyme.”
Most wretched men are cradled to poetry by wrong: they learn in suffering what they teach in song.
Take the commonplace, clean and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet’s job.
The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.
For me, poetry is an impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.
The poetry of heroism appeals irresitably to those who don’t go to a war, and even more so to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy.
Why need every honest poet be suspected of leading a quadruple life? Sometimes the second or third meaning is less interesting than the first, and the only really difficult thing about a poem is the critic’s explanation of it.
