"With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem."

Poetry, Determination, Man

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"With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem."

Exlpore more Poetry quotes

"It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road."

Virginia Woolf, British Author

Poetry, Movement, Memory, Time

"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."

Percy Bysshe Shelley, English Poet

Poetry,

"I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me."

Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist

Poetry, Sound, Words, Movement

"Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry."

Karl Schlegel, German Philosopher

Poetry, Women

"One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."

Robert Frost, American Poet

Poetry, Nature, Metaphor, Life

"Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet."

Virginia Woolf, British Author

Poetry, Creativity, Identity, Words

"There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry."

Emily Dickinson, American Poet

Poetry,

"Will the veiled sister pray for Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee, Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray For children at the gate Who will not go away and cannot pray: Pray for those who chose and oppose."

T. S. Eliot, American Poet

Poetry, Prayer, Darkness, Choice, Hope

"The words of the true poems give you more than poems, they give you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war, peace, behavior, histories, essays, daily life, & everything else, they balance the ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes, they do not seek beauty, they are sought, forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick. They prepare for death, yet they are not the finish, but rather the outset, they bring none of his or her terminus or to be content & full, whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of the stars, to learn one of the meanings, to launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings & never be quiet again."

Walt Whitman, American Poet

Poetry, Inspirational, Art, Life

"Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door;Smiling, he greets us, on that tranquil shoreWhere neither piping bird nor peeping dawnDisturbs the eternal sleep,But in the stillness far withdrawnOur dreamless rest for evermore we keep."

Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish Writer

Poetry, Death, Peace, Rest, Eternity

Explore more quotes by Lascelles Abercrombie

"The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind him too; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather more strictly compelling."

Style

"But the development of human society does not go straight forward; and the epic process will therefore be a recurring process, the series a recurring series - though not in exact repetition."

Society

"It seems difficult, sometimes, to believe that there was a time when sentiments now become habitual, sentiments that imply not only the original imperative of conduct, but the original metaphysic of living, were by no means altogether habitual."

Time

"The world knows of a vast stock of epic material scattered up and down the nations; sometimes its artistic value is as extraordinary as its archaeological interest, but not always."

Interest

"Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours."

Poetry

"The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals; but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else."

Age

"The Border Ballads, for instance, and the Robin Hood Ballads, clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a very circumscribed and not very important heroic age."

Age

"Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind."

Poetry

"If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it."

Poetry

"But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell."

Beauty