Robert Wilson Lynd Quotes

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

In my mind's eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.

Poetry is perhaps what teaches us to nurture the charming illusion: how to be reborn out of ourselves over and over again, and use words to construct a better world, a fictitious world that enables us to sign a pact for a permanent and comprehensive peace ... with life.

The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world.

Imagining is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints.

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.

A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.

Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.

The poetic myths are dead; and the poetic image, which is the myth of the individual, reigns in their stead.

I want to be magic. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile. I want to be a friend of elves and live in a tree. Or under a hill. I want to marry a moonbeam and hear the stars sing. I don't want to pretend at magic anymore. I want to be magic.

Art is an effort to make you walk a half an inch above ground.

Did you ever build a castle in the Air? Here is one, brought down to earth and fixed for the wonder of ages.

Tell me", he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how to speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depth of the sea instead?

A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.

A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the Polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.

Poetry is a whim of Nature in her lighter moods; it requires nothing but its own madness and, lacking that, it becomes a soundless cymbal, a belfry without a bell.

Now if I don't meet you no more in this world, then I'll, I'll meet you in the next one, and don't be late, don't be late, cause I'm a voodoo chile.

Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling. A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually - that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too - but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.

The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and storytellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.