Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house.
Poetry Quotes
If the grain were separated from the chaff, which fills the works of our national poets, what is truly valuable would be to what is useless in the proportion of a molehill to a mountain.
Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.
The Poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of a man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, […]
Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I […]
Troy owes to Homer what whist owes to Hoyle.
Poets and such persons talk about the public as if it were some enormous and abnormal monster-a huge hybrid between the cow they milk and the dragon that drinks their blood.
The discoveries of science leave the world as full of poetry as they found it.
