Anybody can write the first line of a poem, but is a very difficult task to make the second line rhyme with the first.
Poetry Quotes
The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.
By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.
Poetry, like chastity, can be carried to far.
Lowell was not a great grower – he was a builder. He ‘built’ poems; he didn’t put in the seed, and water the seed, and send down his sun – letting the rest take care of itself: he measured his poems – kept them within the formula.
Poetry avoids the last illusion of prose, which so gently sometimes and at others so passionately pretends that things are thus and thus. In poetry they are also thus and thus, but because the arrangement of the lines, the pattern within the whole, will have it so. Exquisitely leaning toward an implied untruth, prose persuades […]
My usual style of ciphering out the merits of poetry… is to read a line or two near the top, a verse near the bottom and then strike an average.
The great poems, Shakespeare’s included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common man, the life-blood of democracy.
But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declaim or explain, it presents.
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
