William Wordsworth Quotes

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

The best poems come from the world, go through the poet, and go back in to the world.

There's a spiritual complement to any attempt at transposing a commitment to humanity through music or art.

Art is in the process of redefining our relationships to each other ... The creative minds are bubbling, bubbling, and I know the soup that's coming up next time is going to feed a lot more of us.

Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.

Verses are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals feel how birds fly, and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.

Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone. It can for children - for anyone. It still does for me.

For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary.

Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.

No art can develop until it penetrates deeply into the life of the people.

I have tried to remember throughout that poetry is made by flesh-and-blood human beings. It is a bloody art. It lives on a human scale and thrives when it is passed from hand to hand.

Angel and Muse approach from without; the Angel sheds light and the Muse gives form (Hesiod learned of them). Gold leaf or chiton-folds: the poet finds his models in his laurel coppice. But the Duende, on the other hand, must come to life in the nethermost recesses of the blood.

What is commonly called ugliness in nature can in art become full of beauty.

Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.

Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.

I am also an artist. I have the whole world as my canvas. I paint souls.

The artist has a special task and duty... reminding people of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.

I've always painted pictures in which human love floods my colors.

An artist in my eyes, is someone who can lighten up a dark room. I have never and will never find difference between the pass from Pele to Carlos Alberto in the final of the World Cup in 1970 and the poetry of the young Rimbaud, who stretches cords from steeple to steeple and garlands from window to window. There is in each of these human manifestations an expression of beauty which touches us and gives us a feeling of eternity.

No one should have to pay for love in flesh or blood. (Acheron)

Through artists mankind becomes an individual, in that they unite the past and the future in the present. They are the higher organ of the soul, where the life spirits of entire external mankind meet and in which inner mankind first acts.

Race, blood, lineage, and nationality don't matter; they're just the way that small minds keep score. All that matters about blood is that it's warm and that it beats through a loving heart.

For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.

That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.

The act of creation can be an extreme violent experience.