It is the dissatisfaction with empiric evidence that makes the poet and the mystic, for it is the lyric as well as the Bachantic impulse… Its purest form is probably manifested by children and birds in their rhapsodic moments of flight and play, especially during the last few minutes of pale blue summer dusk before […]
Poetry Quotes
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
Yes, threadbare seem his songs, to lettered ken – they were worn threadbare next the hearts of men. (On Longfellow)
Times change and forms and their meanings alter. Thus new poems are necessary. Their forms must be discovered in the spoken, living language of their day, or old forms, embodying exploded concepts, will tyrannize over imagination, depriving us of its greatest benefits. In the forms of new poems will lie embedded the essences of future […]
Poetry is for women, I suppose? she said. Created by men with women in mind. Like Crimplene.
The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.
Whatever my life has been it has been single in purpose, single in design and constantly directed to the one end of discovery, if possible, of some purpose in being alive… Poetry, an art, is what answer I have.
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
I think there is no such thing as a long poem. If it is long it isn’t a poem; it is something else. A book like John Brown’s Body, for instance, is not a poem – it is a series of poems tied together with cord. Poetry is intensity, and nothing is intense for long.
It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
