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The romanticised life, where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from, is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence.
Sep 10, 2025
All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart.
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.
Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.
A poem begins with a lump in the throat
Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.
As a fairly innocent teenager, growing up in a village in Wales, I just thought, "God, I would like to go and hang about Soho and write great poetry and try to avoid drinking myself to death."
She had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed though a long servitude, though its own self-hatred, though mockery, though great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
Shakespeare wrote great poetry and preposterous plays. Who really cares, for example, which petty tyrant rules Milan? Or who succeeds to the throne of Denmark? Or why the barons ganged up on Richard II?
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.
I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.
Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.
The poem . . . is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire.
The most beautiful conception of immortality of which I know, and certainly one that by contrast shows the utter vulgarity of Christian ideas, is set forth in Pindar's second Olympian: after three or six lives in which a man has lived with strict justice and perfect integrity, he passes beyond the tower of Cronus to the fair realm that cannot be reached by land or sea, where gentle breezes from a placid ocean blow forever on the fields of asphodel. For a description, see Pindar. If the beauty of great poetry can commend a religion, here you have it.
Because science flourishes, must poesy decline? The complaint serves but to betray the weakness of the class who urge it. True, in an age like the present,-considerably more scientific than poetical,-science substitutes for the smaller poetry of fiction, the great poetry of truth.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.
Summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date . . .
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
And this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart I carry your heart [ i carry it in my heart ]
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Poetry: the best words in the best order.
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement.
But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.
I don't even think any stimulants really help writing. You talk to most guys and they say, "Hey. I wrote this." And they're out of their head or they had a few beers or a bottle of whiskey. You wake up the next morning, it's usually pretty crap. But you know Dylan Thomas wrote some great poetry. Brendan Behan. You never know but ultimately I'd say you have to get up early in the morning and you're usually sober when you write your good stuff; it's hard work. So alcohol, keep it for chilling out, fun, and having a good time. Not for work.
... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?
Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.
If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.