Matthew Arnold Quotes

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

Truth speaks best in the language of poetry and symbolism, I think.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.

Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling. A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually - that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too - but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.

Love is the reality, and poetry is the drum.

Before you go further, let me tell you what a poem brings, first, you must know the secret, there is no poem to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries.

The beauty of poetry is that the creation transcends the poet.

To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing.

What raises great poetry above all else--it is the entire person and also the entire world.

Let us then blend everything: love, religion, genius, with sunshine, perfume, music, and poetry.

I endeavor to make a picture, for instance, exert a positive influence on the observer by its coloring, mood, and compositional idea, encouraging, say, activation, tranquilization, concentration, or harmony.

A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul.

When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man.

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.

Poetry is perhaps what teaches us to nurture the charming illusion: how to be reborn out of ourselves over and over again, and use words to construct a better world, a fictitious world that enables us to sign a pact for a permanent and comprehensive peace ... with life.

Poetry is enthusiasm with wings of fire; it is the angel of high thoughts, that inspires us with the power of sacrifice.

Sentiment is the poetry of the imagination.