Poetic Sensibility Quotes

Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind.

There is this tendency to think that if you could only find the magic way, then you could become a poet. "Tell me how to become a poet. Tell me what to do." . . . What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you're a poet. But there isn't one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn't any formula for it.

How do you know if your child is a writer? Your obstetrician holds his stethoscope to your abdomen and only hears excuses.

I'm very flower-like. I love classical music. I go to ballet and I cry. There's nothing so beautiful.

Tennyson seems to be the patron saint of the wishy washies, which is perhaps why I admire him so much, not only as a poet, but as a man.

I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.

She is unable to dream, think or love. In a woman, poetry never comes naturally, but always as the result of education. Only the woman of the world is a woman; the rest are simply females.

To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity.

I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.

In every artist there is poetry. In every human being there is the poetic element. We know, we feel, we believe.

I think self-destructiveness is given a really bad rap. I think it can also mean self-reflection and poetic sensiblity. It can mean empathy, hedonism, a libertarianism.

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.

This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost everybody is a poet, but scarcely anyone can write a poem.

Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.

...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.

Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.

A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.

Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.

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.

If you haven't had at least a slight poetic crack in the heart, you have been cheated by nature.

The reason why Matthew Arnold, to my feeling, fails entirely as a poet (though no doubt his ideas were good - at least, I am told they were) is that he had no sense of touch whatsoever. Nothing made any impression on his skin. He could feel neither the shape nor the texture of a poem with his hands.