Verses Quotes - Page 17

• There is some reason to believe that when a man does not write his poetry it escapes by other vents through him, instead of the one vent of writing; clings to his form and manners, whilst poets have often nothing poetical about them except their verses.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Believe, Writing, Creativity

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.389

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• I know as well as thee that I am no poet born
  It is a trade, I never learnt nor indeed could learn
  If I make verses-'tis in spite
  Of nature and my stars I write.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Stars, Writing, Poet

  James C. Humes, Benjamin Franklin (1995). “The wit and wisdom of Benjamin Franklin: a treasury of more than 900 quotations and anecdotes”, Harpercollins

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• O ye dead Poets, who are living still Immortal in your verse, though life be fled, And ye, O living Poets, who are dead Though ye are living, if neglect can kill, Tell me if in the darkest hours of ill, With drops of anguish falling fast and red From the sharp crown of thorns upon your head, Ye were not glad your errand to fulfill?

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Fall, Crowns, Errands

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2012). “Favorite Poems”, p.100, Courier Corporation

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• The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Eye, Ears, Pages

  Nicholas Murray Butler (1911). “Philosophy”

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• Verse hath a middle nature: heaven keeps souls, The grave keeps bodies, verse the fame enrols.

  John Donne

  Heaven, Soul, Body

  1611 'An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary'.

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• You now have learned enough to see That Cats are much like you and me And other people whom we find Possessed of various types of mind. For some are sane and some are mad And some are good and some are bad And some are better, some are worse — But all may be described in verse.

  Garrison Keillor

  Cat, People, Mad

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• And pomp, and feast, and revelry, With mask, and antique pageantry, Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream. Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson's learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child, Warble his native wood-notes wild, And ever, against eating cares, Lap me in soft Lydian airs, Married to immortal verse Such as the meeting soul may pierce, In notes with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out.

  John Milton

  Summer, Dream, Children

  'L'Allegro' (1645) l. 125

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• Great thoughts in crude, unshapely verse set forth lose half their preciousness, and ever must, unless the diamond with its own rich dust be cut and polished, it seems little worth.

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich

  Cutting, Dust, Half

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1907). “Poems”

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• Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance.

  Amy Lowell

  Use, Cadence, Kind

  "Can Grande's Castle". Book by Amy Lowell, 1921.

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• Nothing whips my blood like verse.

  William Carlos Williams

  Blood, Whips

  Quoted in John Thirlwall (ed) The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams (1957).

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• Give me a flagon of red wine, a book of verses, a loaf of bread, and a little idleness. If with such store I might sit by thy dear side in some lonely place, I should deem myself happier than a king in his kingdom.

  Omar Khayyam

  Lonely, Kings, Book

  Omar Khayyam (1898). “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám”

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• The glorious Dryden, refiner and purifier of English verse, did less for rhyme than he did for metre.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Rhyme, Glorious

  H. P. Lovecraft (2013). “The Conservative”, p.53, Arktos

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• When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical.

  William Shakespeare

  Children, Men, Understanding

  William Shakespeare, Joseph Dennie, Isaac Reed, Samuel Johnson, George Steevens (1805). “As you like it. All's well that ends well”, p.89

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• I can scarce bring myself to believe, that I am admitted to a familiar correspondence, and all the license of friendship, with a man who writes blank verse like Milton.

  Charles Lamb

  Believe, Writing, Men

  Charles Lamb, Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd (1856). “The Life and Letters”, p.53

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• I dream of silent verses where the rhyme glides noiseless as an oar.

  Richard Aldington

  Dream, Silent, Rhyme

  Richard Aldington (1928). “Collected poems”

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• It is a commonplace that Racine is untranslatable. This is not because his verse is difficult, but because it is not.

  Kenneth Rexroth

  Difficult, Commonplace

  Kenneth Rexroth, Bradford Morrow (1989). “More Classics Revisited”, p.54, New Directions Publishing

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• I thinke it not amisse to forewarne you that you thrust as few wordes of many sillables into your verse as may be: and hereunto I might alledge many reasons: first the most auncient English wordes are of one sillable, so that the more monasyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seeme, and the lesse you shall smell of the Inkehorne.

  George Gascoigne

  Smell, Use, May

  George Gascoigne, John W. Cunliffe (2012). “The Complete Works of George Gascoigne: Volume 1, The Posies”, p.468, Cambridge University Press

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• What I desire of a poem is a clear understanding of motive, and a just evaluation of feeling A poem in the first place should offer us a new perception..bringing into being a new experience Verse is more valuable than prose for its rhythms are faster and more highly organised and lead to greater compexity.

  Yvor Winters

  New Experiences, Feelings, Understanding

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• Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash course in villanelles, sestinas and other such fixed forms. But most... are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so.

  James Fenton

  Regret, Believe, Reading

  "An Introduction to English Poetry". Book by James Fenton, 2002.

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• When I sit near the ocean in the morning and write my verses and breathe the salty wind which is coming from the water, I rejoice in God and I am blissful, as I was as a child.

  Joseph Goebbels

  Morning, Children, Ocean

  "Michael: a German fate in diary notes". Book by Joseph Goebbels, 1929.

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• I had a fall out with Satan. Repeating satanic verses.

  Layzie Bone

  Fall, Satanic, Satan

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• I remember, when I was a child and wrote poems in little clasped books, I used to kiss the books and put them away tenderly because I had been happy near them, and take them out by turns when I was going from home, to cheer them by the change of air and the pleasure of the new place. This, not for the sake of the verses written in them, and not for the sake of writing more verses in them, but from pure gratitude.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Gratitude, Cheer, Children

  Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2009). “The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: 1845-1846”, p.54, The Floating Press

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• Will there never come a season Which shall rid us from the curse? Of a prose which knows no reason And an unmelodious verse: When the world shall cease to wonder At the genius of an Ass, And a boy's eccentric blunder Shall not bring success to pass: When mankind shall be delivered From the clash of magazines, And the inkstand shall be shivered Into countless smithereens: When there stands a muzzled stripling, Mute, beside a muzzled bore: When the Rudyards cease from Kipling And the Haggards Ride no more.

  James Kenneth Stephen

  Boys, World, Eccentric

  James Kenneth Stephen, “To R. K.”

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• Prophet Mohammed would have no objection to The Satanic Verses.

  Salman Rushdie

  Motivational, Satanic, Prophet

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• Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.

  Edith Sitwell

  Lying, Book, Giving

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