Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes

Painters of paintings, writers of books, never could tell the half.

I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.

Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.

I wished to copy nature. I could not. But I was satisfied when I discovered the sun, for instance, could not be reproduced, but only represented by something else.

Nor ought a genius less than his that writ attempt translation.

But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

I think no matter what kind of music you play, there will be moments when you feel like it's all been done before.

I had always planned to make a large painting of the early spring, when the first leaves are at the bottom of the trees, and they seem to float in space in a wonderful way. But the arrival of spring can't be done in one picture.

I don't like drawing characters facing right.

You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.

It's very strange to go from being completely secluded and doing your own work for yourself, to having an audience - and having an audience that's aware of what you do and expects you to do things that they like. It can make things difficult.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

We are proud to have with us the poet lariat of Chicago.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.

The physical characteristics of the child Jesus will always remain a point of discussion. No artist has ever produced a type, nor ever will, that has in it all that the varying minds of all time will acknowledge as complete.

Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

The formula is the star. I couldn't work inside that formula.

Most writers censor themselves in awful ways. I do, too.

Mostly, when I travel, I want to represent my own work well and let others know how I feel about poetry being an important part of life.

By the time I was 12, I had memorised hundreds of couplets. I could recite for hours poems written by others. I knew I could write a line in metre. But I never dared to do it till I was 33 years old.