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What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.
Sep 10, 2025
Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.
One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a well-made verbal object that does honor to the language in which it is written. Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective. What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own.
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
A poet who makes use of a worse word instead of a better, because the former fits the rhyme or the measure, though it weakens the sense, is like a jeweller, who cuts a diamond into a brilliant, and diminishes the weight to make it shine more.
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
God is the perfect poet, Who in his person acts his own creations.
There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
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 . . .
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth.
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.
Keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.
The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.
Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women mearly players.
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.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.
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