George Steiner Quotes

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

If people connect me with the Romantics in general, they probably connect me most with Keats. But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

The reverie we intend to study is poetic reverie. This is a reverie which poetry puts on the right track, the track an expanding consciousness follows. This reverie is written, or, at least, promises to be written. It is already facing the great universe of the blank page. Then images begin to compose and fall into place.

When Byron's eyes were shut in death, We bow'd our head and held our breath. He taught us little; but our soul Had felt his like a thunder roll. . . . We watch'd the fount of fiery life Which serv'd for that Titanic life.

Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.

The Poet is like the prince of the clouds, who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer. Exiled on the ground in the midst of the jeering crowd, his giant's wings keep him from walking.

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

Prose is walking; poetry is flying

Very soon he will vanish completely in the wings of his own wordless stanza. [ ] but his stanza is not completely empty [ * ]

The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.

Not to admire, is all the art I know To make men happy, or to keep them so. Thus Horace wrote we all know long ago; And thus Pope quotes the precept to re-teach From his translation; but had none admired, Would Pope have sung, or Horace been inspired?

All the world can be found in poetry. All you need to see and hear. All the moments, good and bad, joyous and sad.

Pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry.

Virgil, above all poets, had a stock which I may call almost inexhaustible, of figurative, elegant, and sounding words.

I love Derrick Brown for the surprise of one word waking up next to another. One moment tender, funny or romantic, the next, visceral, ironic and relevatory-here is the full chaos of life. An amazing talent.

Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night.

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.

Clouds are poems, and the most moving poems linger on the blackboard so long, written in cursive so lovely, they also exist inside our fingertips. We never really erase them at the end of the lesson.

What is poetry? Do not enquire. The secret dies by prying. How does the heart beat? I fainted when I saw it on the screen, opening and closing like a flower ... Poetry is like this, it is life moving, terrible, vivid. Look the other way when you write, or you might faint.

Lizzie Harris's debut collection, Stop Wanting, crafts images and lines of such arresting splendor that I am very often driven to joy at the feats of beauty and healing that language is capable of bringing into being.

Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge of driftwood along the beach, wanting! They derive from a slow and powerful root that we can’t see. Stop the words now. Open the window in the center of your chest, and let the spirits fly in and out.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.