Poetic Decline Quotes

How have you left the ancient love That bards of old enjoyed in you! The languid strings do scarcely move! The sound is forced, the notes are few!

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

These poets (fans of whatever) should be contacting other young poets on their way - not those who have made it, who sit on a star and then have plenty of problems: usually no money, usually the fear their own writing is going down the sink hole.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

When poets go off the boil, they sound like bumble bees; when critics do, they sound like sewing machines.

New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

Everyone is a poet at 16, but how many are poets at 50? Generally, people seem to get more conservative as they age, but in my case, I seem to have gotten more radical.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

Art is eternally young, but the poet ages. If only he remained as young as art! If only it aged with him!

En ge ne ral, plus un peuple est civilise , poli, moins ses moeurs sont poe tiques; tout s'affaiblit en s'adoucissant. Ingeneral, themore civilized and refinedthepeople, the less poetic are its morals; everything weakens as it mellows.

In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a bad man. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles and wrote bad poetry.

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.

When Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry.

Only those of our poets who kept solidly to the Shakespearean tradition achieved any measure of success. But Keats was the last great exponent of that tradition, and we all know how thin, how lacking in charm, the copies of Keats have become.

He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.

One thing I feel is this: that a great deal of poetry is the product of adolescence-or of an emotionally adolescent frame of mind: and that as this state of mind changes, poetry is likely to dry up.

I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.

Some have at first for wits, then poets passed, Turned critics next, and proved plain fools at last.

Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.

[On collectors of quotations:] How far our literature may in future suffer from these blighting swarms, will best be conceived by a glance at what they have already withered and blasted of the favourite productions of our most popular poets.