Poetic Solace Quotes

I carry Yeats with me wherever I go. He's my constant companion. I always can find some comfort in Yeats no matter what the situation is. Months and months and months go by and I know I need to switch to Shelley or somebody else, but right now Yeats is enough for me.

The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely.

Sometimes, when I am tired of so many oscillations, I look for refuge in a word which I begin to love for itself. Resting in the heart of words, seeing clearly into the cell of a word, feeling that the word is the seed of a life, a growing dawn... The poet Vandercammen says all that in a line: "A word can be a dawn and even a sure shelter."

Poems mesmerized me, and I felt better when I was writing them, or trying to - more in touch with something deep and dark within myself.

Only because uplifted in song, was I able to endure the blaze of the dawn.

The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth.

The old poets little knew what comfort they could be to a man.

Only poetry can address grief.

And ever against eating cares Lap me in soft Lydian airs, Married to immortal verse