Quotes about Poetry

The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.

The true notion is that the material universe is a sign or an indication of what God is. We look at the purity of the snowflake and we see something of the goodness of God. The world is full of poetry: it is sin which turns it into prose.

As, in the serious style, Homer is pre-eminent among poets, for he alone combined dramatic form with excellence of imitation, so he too first laid down the main lines of Comedy, by dramatising the ludicrous instead of writing personal satire.

and Euripides, faulty though he may be in the general management of his subject, yet is felt to be the most tragic of the poets.

If the poet's description be criticized as not true to fact, one may urge perhaps that the object ought to be as described—an answer like that of Sophocles, who said that he drew men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they were.

The reason for their original use of the trochaic tetrameter was that their poetry was satyric and more connected with dancing than it now is. As soon, however, as a spoken part came in, nature herself found the appropriate metre. The iambic, we know, is the most speakable of metres, as is shown by the fact that we very often fall into it in conversation, whereas we rarely talk hexameters, and only when we depart from the speaking tone of voice.

The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse — you might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history; it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

These my sky-robes, spun out of Iris' woof.

Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose.

He knew himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once moreYe myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forc'd fingers rude shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

It was the winter wild while the Heav'n-born child all meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies.