H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican.

If certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.

Read not Milton, for he is dry; nor Shakespeare, for he wrote of common life.

There's no artist in this world that doesn't enjoy the dream that if they have bad reviews now, the story of Keats can redeem them, in their fantasy or imagination, in the future. I think Keats' poem 'Endymion' is a really difficult poem, and I'm not surprised that a lot of people pulled it apart in a way.

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

A jargon form'd from the lost language, wit, Confounded in that Babel of the pit; Form'd by diseased conceptions, weak and wild, Sick lust of souls, and an abortive child; Born between whores and fops, by lewd compacts, Before the play, or else between the acts; Nor wonder, if from such polluted minds Should spring such short and transitory kinds.

The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth.

They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow.

I don't want people running around saying Gwen Brooks's work is intellectual. That makes people think instantly about obscurity. It shouldn't have to mean that, but it often seems to.

I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die.

Modern poets add a lot of water to their ink.

Go little book, thy self present, As child whose parent is unkent: To him that is the president Of noblesse and of chivalry, And if that Envy bark at thee, As sure it will, for succour flee.

Robert Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even - "at least not systematic"; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest.

...these poets here, you see, they are not of this world:let them live their strange life; let them be cold and hungry, let them run, love and sing: they are as rich as Jacques Coeur, all these silly children, for they have their souls full of rhymes, rhymes which laugh and cry, which make us laugh or cry: Let them live: God blesses all the merciful: and the world blesses the poets.

Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.

Much of our poetry has the very best manners, but no character.

Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as soon as he reflects he is a child.

There are two ways of disliking poetry, one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.

I hate French poetry. What measured glitter!

I was ordered to go for flowers, that my mistress's house might be decorated for an evening party. I spent the day gathering flowers and weaving them into festoons, while the dead body of my father was lying within a mile of me. What cared my owners for that? he was merely a piece of property. Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings. This was blasphemous doctrine for a slave to teach; presumptuous in him, and dangerous to the masters.

Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive.

If I am a prolific writer and turn my hand, with what seems to some as indecent haste, from novels to screenplays to stage and radio plays, it is because there is so much to be said, so few of us to say it, and time runs out.

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.

I am reading Jonson's verses to the memory of Shakespeare; an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric.