John Drinkwater Quotes

The finest poetry was first experience.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

I would rather die than be a serious artist, or a fake artist.

Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.

I think that music and art and film, at their best, can connect with something that is eternal in human beings, that might not have so many labels on it, something that's ultimately universal and that may just be a feeling.

See, when I paint, it is an experience that, at its best, is transcending reality.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Once again, I think there is little art being done that really owns up to such intense possibilities.

There are contemporary artists that I hate with all my heart. These are provocateurs that are without feeling. Where is the real emotion?

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

Art is expression; what is expressed is often the vision of a subtle and powerful soul, and also his experience with his vision; and however vivid and skilful he may be in the means of expression, yet it is frequently found that the master-spell in his work is something felt to be indefinable and inexpressible.

A thing may fail as a poem because it tries to do what a poem cannot do: it tries to become a treatise on cosmic truth... We can best be exact about the cosmic things - God and truth, beauty, eternity and love - by not talking directly about them.

Poetry is that sentiment of the soul, or faculty of the mind, which enables its possessor to appreciate and realize the heights and depths of human experience. It is the power to feel pleasure or suffer pain in all its exquisiteness and intensity.

Poetry isn't an activity, it's a way life is lived.

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.

Those works whose ideal has not as much living reality and, as it were, personality as the beloved one or a friend had better remain unwritten. They would at least never become works of art.

The truest poetry is the most feigning.

Personally, I never believe an artist saying "I do it for myself" is saying the truth, because why would you go through the trouble of making something that goes out into the world if you didn't care about somebody else seeing it? It's like the difference between those who choose "more comfortably termed entertainment" versus what people think of as the "art life," which is supposedly more monastic or spiritual. I don't believe in those distinctions.

If you are not passionately devoted to an idea, you can make very pleasant pictures but they won't make you cry.

Only dull and impotent artists screen their work with sincerity. In art there is need for truth, not sincerity.

Natural emotion is the soul of poetry, as melody is of music; the same faults are engendered by over-study of either art; there is a lack of sincerity, of irresistible impulse in both the poet and the, composer.

Shakespeare possesses the power of subordinating nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets. His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is uppermost in his mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together, by subtle spiritual connection. We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet.

Some people might think that sex is the highest experience you can have. I tend to think that music is.

In art there is a need for truth, not sincerity.