Edith Hamilton Quotes

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

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

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

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

And when no hope was left inside on that starry, starry night, you took your life as lovers often do. But I could have told you, Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.

There are people who buy pictures because they were difficult to do, and are done. Such pictures are often only a record of pain and dull perseverance. Great works of art should look as though they were made in joy. Real joy is a tremendous activity, dull drudgery is nothing to it.

It is very difficult to pass from pleasure to work. Accordingly more poems have been swallowed up by sorrow than ever happiness caused to blaze forth in unparalleled radiance.

Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.

What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.

I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.

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.

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.

You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.

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

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

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

Beauty makes one lose one's head. Poetry is born of this decapitation

As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.

To explain away the mystery of a great painting - if such a feat were possible - would do irreparable harm... If there is no mystery, then there is no poetry, the quality I value above all else in art.

Look, do you see that poem?' she said suddenly, pointing.

In science, reason is the guide; in poetry, taste. The object of the one is truth, which is uniform and indivisible; the object of the other is beauty, which is multiform and varied.

Sentiment is the poetry of the imagination.

I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian]

The present is never poetic as it serves necessity, necessity, however, is prosaic.

If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.