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O bards of rhyme and metre free,
My gratitude goes out to ye
For all your deathless lines—ahem!
Let's see now . . . . What is one of them?—F. P. A. Exchange
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In days of yore, the poet's pen
From wing of bird was plundered,
Perhaps of goose, but now and then
From Jove's own eagle sundered.
But now, metallic pens disclose
Alone the poet's numbers;
In iron inspiration glows,
Or with the poet slumbers.—JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, The Pen
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You do poets and their song
A grievous wrong,
If your own soul does not bring
To their high imagining
As much beauty as they sing.—T. B. ALDRICH, Appreciation
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Enamored architect of airy rhyme,
Build as thou wilt, heed not what each man says.—T. B. ALDRICH, Enamored Architect of Airy Rhyme
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Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.—MATTHEW ARNOLD, Essays
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Poets are all who love, who feel great truths,
And tell them ; and the truth of truths is love.—PHILIP J. BAILEY, Festus
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Poets are people who despise money except what you need for today.—J. M. BARRIE, The Little'White Bird
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Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.—BLAKE, Jerusalem
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Poets ever fail in reading their own verses to their worth.—ELIZABETH B. BROWNING, Lady Geraldine's Courtship
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All poetry is difficult to read,—
The sense of it is anyhow.BROWNING, The Ring and the Book
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Thoughts may be
Dyer-poetical for poetry.—BROWNING, Sordello
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And poets by their sufferings grow,
As if there were no more to do,
To make a poet excellent,
But only want and discontent.—SAMUEL BUTLER, Fragments
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He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.—CARLYLE, Introduction to Cromwell's Letters
& Speeches
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A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossiility.—CARLYLE, Burns
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How does the poet speak to nen, with power, but by being still nore a man than they?—CARLYLE, Burns
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He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a ieroic poem.—CARLYLE, Life of Schiller
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A vein of poetry exists in the warts of all men.—CARLYLE, Heroes & Hero-Worship
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There is a thing called potical license.—CERVANTES, Don Quixote
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Modesty is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.—CERVANTES, Don Quixote
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Most joyful let the Poet be;
It is through him that all men see.—W. E. CHANNING, The Poet of the Old and New Times
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Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.—G. K. CHESTERTON
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The more modern poets are quite capable of keeping the commas and leaving out the words.—G. K. CHESTERTON
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Good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its draper, motion its life, and imagination the soul.—COLERIDGE, Biographia Literaria
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A poem is not necessarily obscure, because it does not aim to be popular. It is enough if a work be perspicuous to those for whom it is written.—COLERIDGE,
Biographia Literaria
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I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their best order.—COLERIDGE, Lectures on Shakespeare & Milton
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There is a pleasure in poetic pains
Which only poets know.—COWPER, The Task
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If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?—EMILY DICKINSON, Brooks: New England: Indian Summer
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Form is the Cage and Sense the Bird.
The Poet twirls them in his Mind,
And wins the Trick with both combined.—AUSTIN DOBSON, The Toyman
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For that fine madness still he did retain
Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.—MICHAEL DRAYTON
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O gracious God! how far have we
Profan'd thy heavenly gift of poesy!—DRYDEN, Elegy on Mrs. Killigrew
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The verse of every young poet, however original he may afterwards grow, usually has plainly written across it the rhythmic signature of some great master.—HAVELOCK ELLIS, The Dance of Life
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Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks lo quacity.—EMERSON, Parnassus
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There are two classes of poets,—the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.—EMERSON, Parnassus
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Do you know,
Considering the market, there are more
Poems produced than any other thing?
No wonder poets sometimes have to seem
So much more business-like than business men
Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.—ROBERT FROST, New Hampshire
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There is only good and bad poetry.—GOETHE, when asked about classic and romantic poetry.
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I knew that if I could get [W. B.] Yeats on a horse I could put a new rhythm into English lyric verse.—O. ST. J. GOGARTY, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street
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It is not the statesman, the warrior, or the monarch that survives, but the despised poet, whom they may have fed with their crumbs, and to whom they owe all that they now are or have—a name.—HAWTHORNE, Our Old Home
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I know not if I deserve that a laurel wreath should one day be laid on my coffin. Poetry, dearly as I have loved it, has always been to me but a divine plaything. I have never attached any great value to Poetical fame; and I trouble myself very little whether people praise my verses or blame them. But lay on my coffin a
sword for I was a brave soldier in the war of Liberation for humanity.—HEINE
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A verse may find him who a sermon flies,
And turn delight into a sacrifice.—GEORGE HERBERT, The Church Porch
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Vain was the chief's, the sage's pride!
They had no poet, and they died.—HORACE
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In every volume of poems something good may be found.—SAMUEL JOHNSON, Boswell: Life
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For a good poet's made, as well as born.—BEN JONSON, To the Memory of Shakespeare
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The poetry of earth is never dead.—KEATS, On the Grasshopper and Cricket
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Poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.—KEATS
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The young poet screams forever
About his sex and his soul.—JOYCE KILMER, Old Poets
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The pleasantest sort of poet
Is the poet who's old and wise.—JOYCE KILMER, Old Poets
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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, Old Poets
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'Tis verse that gives Immortal youth to mortal maids.—W. S. LANDOR, Verse
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Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending;
Many a poem is marred by a superfluous verse.—LONGFELLOW, Elegiac Verse
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And I believed the poets; it is they
Who utter wisdom from the central deep,
And, listening to the inner flow of things,
Speak to the age out of eternity.—LOWELL, Columbus
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The newspaper poet's a commonplace fellow—
The humblest may know what his Poetry means.
But clearness is treason, and so, for this reason,
He never gets into the big magazines.—DENIS MCCARTHY, The Newspaper Poet
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Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even, can enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.—MACAULAY, On Milton
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We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.—MACAULAY, On Milton
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A poem should not mean
But be.—ARCHIBALD MACLEISH: Ars Poetica
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Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.—DON MARQUIS, The Sun Dial
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Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.—DON MARQUIS, The Sun Dial
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Anyone may be an honourable man, and yet write verse badly.—MOLIERE, Le Misanthrope
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Happy it is for mankind that Heaven has laid on few men the curse of being poets.—F. F. MOORE, The Jessamy Bride
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My definition of pure poetry, something that the poet creates outside of his own personality.—GEORGE MOORE, Anthology of Pure Poetry
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A regular poet published a book,
And an excellent book it was,
But nobody gave it a second look,
As nobody often does.—OGDEN NASH, A Parable for Sports Writers
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Whatever your occupation may be and however crowded your hours with affairs, do not fail to secure at least a few minutes every day for refreshment of your inner life with a bit of poetry.—CHARLES E. NORTON
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Poetry comes fine spun from a mind at peace.—OVID, Tristia
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Let us understand by poetry all literary production which attains the power of giving pleasure by its form, as distinct from its matter.—WALTER PATER, The Renaissance
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With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not—they can not at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.—POE, Poems: Preface
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I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste.—POE, The Poetic Principle
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While pensive poets painful vigils keep,
Sleepless themselves to give their readers sleep.—POPE, The Dunciad
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I never indulge in poetics
Unless I am down with rheumatics.—QUINTUS ENNIUS
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Ne'er
Was flattery lost on poet's ear;
A simple race ! they waste their toil
For the vain tribute of a smile.—SCOTT, The Lay of the Last Minstrel
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Call it not vain: they do not err
Who say, that when the poet dies,
Mute Nature mourns her worshipper,
And celebrates his obsequies.—SCOTT, The Lay of the Last Minstrel
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Neither rhyme nor reason.—SHAKESPEARE, As You Like It
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I would the gods had made thee poetical.—SHAKESPEARE, As You Like It
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I had rather be a kitten and cry mew,
Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers.—SHAKESPEARE, Henry IV
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I was not born under a rhyming planet.—SHAKESPEARE, Much Ado About Nothing
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Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.—SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet LV
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Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You still shall live—such virtue hath my pen—
Where breath most breathes,—even in the mouths of men.—SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet LXXXI
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The modest cough of a minor poet.—BERNARD SHAW, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets
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Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.—SHELLEY, A Defence of Poetry
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Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.—SHELLEY, A Defence of Poetry
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Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.—SHELLEY, A Defence of Poetry
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Of all the threads of rhyme
Which I have spun,
I shall be glad if Time
Save only one.—FRANK D. SHERMAN, His Desire
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Sweet food of sweetly uttered knowledge.—SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, Defence of Poesy
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You hope that we shall tell you that they found their happiness in fighting,
Or that they died with a song on their lips,
Or that we shall use the old familiar phrases
With which your paid servants please you in the Press:
But we are poets,
And shall tell the truth.—OSBERT SITWELL, Rhapsode
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A poem round and perfect as a star.—ALEXANDER SMITH, A Life Drama
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Poets lose half the praise they should have got,
Could it be known what they discreetly blot.—EDMUND WALLER
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Old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good.—IZAAK WALTON, The Compleat Angler
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The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.—WALT WHITMAN, Preface to Leaves of Grass
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To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.—WALT WHITMAN, Notes Left Over
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A poet can survive everything but a misprint.—OSCAR WILDE, The Children of the Poets
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In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs,—in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.—WORDSWORTH, Lyrical Ballads
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Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.—WORDSWORTH, Lyrical Ballads
