top of page
.png){kind=small}
Exlpore more Poetry quotes
"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."
"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."
"Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry."
"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."
"There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing 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."
"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."
"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."
Explore more quotes by John Drinkwater
"The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music."
"It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature."
"Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events."
"Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them."
"So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse."
"Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way."
"There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and judgment, that it is so."
"The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely."
"We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible."
bottom of page