Elizabeth Janeway Quotes

Better a live doggerel than a dead sonnet.

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever.

Poetry stands or falls by its music.

If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word 'accessible.'

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.

So few people read poetry. That's sad, isn't it?

Accept a miracle, instead of wit See two dull lines, with Stanhope's pencil writ.

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental; they necessarily are reflected in his theology.

Poetry has never been a favorite American pastime.

Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.

At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer or Shakspeare. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd

A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.

One ought, everyday, to hear a song, read a fine poem, and, if possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.

Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.

But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire.... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.

Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.

If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently.

I opened my veins. Unstoppably life spurts out with no remedy. Now I set out bowls and plates. Every bowl will be shallow. Every plate will be small. And overflowing their rims, into the black earth, to nourish the rushes unstoppably without cure, gushes poetry.