expressive verse Quotes

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

Poetry is halfway between prose and music: it is sometimes like an intimate conversation, in words and phrases which need not be fully uttered, and sometimes like dancing and wordless music.

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

Poetry is the apotheosis of sentiment.

Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.

He asked if he could recite a poem he had written that morning: 'You speak,' he said, 'the language of shooting stars, more surprising than sunrise, more brilliant than the sun, as brief as sunset. I want to follow its trail to eternity.

The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky sentence, I try to write up to the poetry that I have recited beforehand.

Poetry, my dear friends, is a sacred incarnation of a smile. Poetry is a sigh that dries the tears. Poetry is a spirit who dwells in the soul, whose nourishment is the heart, whose wine is affection. Poetry that comes not in this form is a false messiah.

Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.

Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest by hard fingers covered with rings.

With living colours give my verse to glow: The sad memorial of a tale of woe!

...in song the words tend to lose their significance, do often lose it, while at the other extreme, in current prose it is the musical value that tends to disappear - so that verse stands symmetrically, as it were, between song, on the one hand, and prose on the other - and is thus admirably and delicately balanced between the sensual and the intellectual power of language.

Ye are better than all the ballads That ever were sung or said; For ye are living poems, And all the rest are dead.

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man.

Logic , like lyrical poetry , is no employment for the middle-aged

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.

I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

Good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.