Quotes about Poetry

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play. I tell you Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.

The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.

Your very flesh shall be a great poem...

Love the earth and sun and animals, Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, Stand up for the stupid and crazy, Devote your income and labor to others... And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul, There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

But a cluster containing night's darkness and blood-dripping wounds, And psalms of the dead.

The great poets are to be known by the absence in them of tricks, and by the justification of perfect personal candor. All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.

Of all races and eras these States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets, and are to have the greatest, and use them the greatest, Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.

but love is not fashionable anymore, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about it that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. I remember myself once-but no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past.

Tread Lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow.