Poetry Quotes - Page 31

• Young and old will sit and judge unfeeling, while the empty churches' bells are pealing. And the green hills lay ignored, untended, lonely watchers remain unbefriended.

  Pete Townshend

  Lonely, Church Bells, Judging

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• Poetry is the special medium of spiritual crazy wisdom, the form of expression that comes closest to creating a bridge between words and what is wordless.

  Wes Nisker

  Spiritual, Crazy, Expression

  Scoop Nisker, Wes Nisker (1990). “Crazy Wisdom”

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• The greatest poem is not that which is most skillfully constructed, but that in which there is the most poetry.

  Leopold Schefer

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• A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

  E. B. White

  Doe, Veils, Littles

  1942 One Man's Meat, 'Poetr y'.

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• Poetry is a mug's game.

  T. S. Eliot

  Games, Mug, Poetry Is

  T.S. Eliot (2016). “The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 6: 1932–1933”, p.22, Faber & Faber

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• When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.

  T. S. Eliot

  Done, Certain, Great Poet

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Notes towards the Definition of Culture”, p.119, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.

  Robert Frost

  Book, Common, Should

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• for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him.

  Plato

  Light, Able, Inspired

  Plato (1938). “Phaedrus, Ion, Gorgias, and Symposium: With Passages from the Republic and Laws”

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• The poet is a pretender. / He pretends so completely, / that he even pretends that it is pain / the pain he really feels.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Pain, Feels, Pretender

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• Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.

  Stephane Mallarme

  Language, States, Crisis

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• I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.

  Robert Graves

  People, Relation, Feels

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• Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.

  Phyllis McGinley

  Reading, Pastime, Amount

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• Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.

  John Millington Synge

  Brutal, Humans, Verses

  John Millington Synge, Ann Saddlemyer (1998). “Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays”, p.10, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Poets arent very usefulBecause they aren't consumeful or produceful.

  Ogden Nash

  Poet

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• What matters Death, if Freedom be not dead?
  No flags are fair, if Freedom's flag be furled.
  Who fights for Freedom, goes with joyful tread
  To meet the fires of Hell against him hurled.

  Joyce Kilmer

  Fighting, Fire, What Matters

  Joyce Kilmer (1968). “Joyce Kilmer: Memoir and poems”

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• The lamp you lighted in the olden time Will show you my heart's-blood beating through the rhyme: A poet's journal, writ in fire and tears... Then slow deliverance, with the gaps of years.

  Bayard Taylor

  Heart, Fire, Blood

  Bayard Taylor (1865). “The Poems of Bayard Taylor”, p.13, Boston : Ticknor and Fields

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• There is no peace to be taken
  With poets who are young,
  For they worry about the wars to be fought
  and the songs that must be sung.

  Joyce Kilmer

  Song, War, Taken

  Joyce Kilmer (1968). “Joyce Kilmer: Memoir and poems”

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• Poetry is what makes my toenails twinkle.

  Dylan Thomas

  Toenails, Poetry Is

  Dylan Thomas, Daniel Jones (2003). “The Poems of Dylan Thomas”, p.22, New Directions Publishing

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• No really sensible person ever remembers enough poetry to recite it.

  E. W. Howe

  Remember, Enough, Sensible

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• Some people pretend they never were in love and never wrote poetry; two weaknesses which they dare not own -- one of the heart, the other of the mind.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Heart, Two, People

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• All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

  Honore de Balzac

  Art, Vision, Works Of Art

  Honore De Balzac (2011). “Louis Lambert”, p.36, The Floating Press

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• I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don't know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren't bothered by each other.

  T. S. Eliot

  Thinking, America, Would Be

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• True poetry is not of earth, 'T is more of Heaven by its birth.

  William Faulkner

  Heaven, Earth, Birth

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• A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.

  John Keats

  Identity, Literature, Body

  John Keats (1994). “The Works of John Keats: With an Introduction and Bibliography”, p.9, Wordsworth Editions

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• A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Fruit, Should, Mute

  'Ars Poetica' (1926)

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