Roger Scruton Quotes

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Music expresses longing and love and joy better than any piece of dialogue you can ever write.

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

Most of all, I like to sing my heart out to lyrics that really speak to people.

By heaven, I do love: and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be mekancholy.

Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.

For thee I dim these eye and stuff this head With all such reading as was never read.

I don't deal in technique. I deal in emotions.

A lot of poems seem, in some sense, to pull the outside world into the interior. They aren't perhaps emotion recollected in tranquillity but perception recollected in interiority.

There's still a feeling that uncensored emotions make a good song. They don't. Pure emotion is just somebody screaming at you, or crying. It doesn't communicate anything.

With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.

Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.

In short, you have only your emotions to sell. This is the experience of all writers.

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

Sentiment is the poetry of the imagination.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.