Josiah Gilbert Holland Quotes

Poetry is the eloquence of verse.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Language is fossil Poetry.

Is there no room for art in the spoken language? What is the use of creating an unnatural language to the exclusion of the natural one?

Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.

I'm only interested in poetry.

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense (Spence, Anecdotes

I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language.

I don't see poetry as something that has to do with too much emotion anyway. It has to do with language.

Poetry -- even bad poetry -- may be our final hope.

Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words on the other hand, were a lifeline. They left their hushed rhythm behind, a counter to the slow in and out of Emmeline's breathing.

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

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

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

During the '70s I was interested in words and meaning as a way of making art.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

The temple of art is built in words.

There's design, and there's art. Good design is total harmony. There's no better designer than nature - if you look at a branch or a leaf, it's perfect. It's all function. Art is different. It's about emotion. It's about suffering and beauty - but mostly suffering!

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

Poetry is music though, unfortunately, not all music is poetry. Because music has other carriers to take its message - beats, lyrics, singers, bass players - anyone in music can rise to make a major statement but in poetry there are only words to do the work. And they do sometimes have to sweat.

Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.