"To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential."

Poetry, May

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"To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential."

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 John Drinkwater

"To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely fulfills the highest function of a government - the realisation of the will of the people."

Government

"If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry."

Poetry

"Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just."

Saying

"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."

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."

Achievement

"When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life."

Life

"For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts."

Poetry

"The written word is everything."

Communication

"Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events."

Man

"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."

Poetry