Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes

When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

I'm partial to epic poetry, which might be surprising given that I don't write poetry at all. The combination of rollicking storytelling with musical language seems to me the highest achievement.

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?

Take my verses too serious ya hate me, cause I'm the one to paint a vivid picture, no HD.

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.

Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.

Harmony of period and melody of style have greater weight than is generally imagined in the judgment we pass upon writing and writers. As a proof of this, let us reflect what texts of scripture, what lines in poetry, or what periods we most remember and quote, either in verse or prose, and we shall find them to be only musical ones.

I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed - it is, indeed, unavoidable.

Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.

Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

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.

The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you’re present in the current moment; when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing; when you are fully alive.

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers.

Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.

Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat

I am far less interested in serving as a change agent than in functioning as a prose artist, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.