Robert Wilson Lynd Quotes

To me the pain and the blood are merely means of artistic expression.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Leo Connellan has retained his soul and voice in Provincetown and Other Poems.

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

Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.

Willmott, the English essayist, says poetry is the natural religion of literature.

Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.

Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up to date in their chemical knowledge.

Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.

When there is war, the poet lays down the lyre, the lawyer his law reports, the schoolboy his books.

The secret of poetry is cruelty.

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.

The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat

The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies, It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess'd them

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

As a painter, cursed or blessed with a terrible and vital sensuousness, I must look for wisdom with my eyes. I repeat, with my eyes, for nothing could be more ridiculous or irrelevant than a 'philosophical conception painted purely intellectually without the terrible fury of the senses grasping each visible form of beauty and ugliness.

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises.

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering--I mean remembering in words--what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives.

Poetry is a whim of Nature in her lighter moods; it requires nothing but its own madness and, lacking that, it becomes a soundless cymbal, a belfry without a bell.

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

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.

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

I sense a scream passing through nature. I painted ... the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you