The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Tag: poetry, poets

Ralph Waldo Emerson

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.

Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can’t understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.

Henry David Thoreau

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read the.

Jorge Luis Borges

As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that linedoes me no good, because, as I’ve already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless.

All we’re trying to do is word the world. Detail is one way we do that. We enumerate, notate, name the things seen.

He thinks my hair smells like spring rain. I’m really trying to remain stoic and unaffected. I remind myself that I don’t like poetic language. I don’t like poetry. I don’t even like people who like poetry.But I’m not dead inside either.

Wallace Stevens

Poetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.

. . . Orpheus struck dumb with hindsight.

William Stafford

Evening came, a paw, to the gray hut by the river.

The bats inebriate the sky . . .

A single wire hanger on a nail by itselfIsn’t bad though a stack of them on a floorIs too gloomy for words.