C. Day Lewis Quotes

I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences.

The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust.

Think about what artists, novelists and poets have in common: the ability to engage in metaphorical thinking, linking seemingly unrelated ideas, such as, 'It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun.'

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

Writing chases after the senses, and conveys them in an altered form. When it is done well, the senses come alive in a new and captured form.

Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something - with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.

There are two types of poets: People who write poetically about their lives, and poets that live poetically and write about it.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry.

Lyrics need to be good, but they don't need to be obvious right away.

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.