More Notes on Poetry
Posted: June 18th, 2008, 9:48 pm
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
~ William Carlos Williams, Journey to Love (1955)
The poem, to me (until I go broke) is an attempt, an experiment, a failing experiment, toward assertion with broken means but an assertion, always, of a new and total culture, the lifting of an environment to expression. Thus it is social, the poem is a social instrument.
~ William Carlos Williams
By our own spirits are we deified:
We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
~ William Wordsworth
Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.
~ William Wordsworth
Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.
~ William Wycherley
Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.
~ William Butler Yeats
I think it better that at times like these
We poets keep our mouths shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He's had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth
Or an old man upon a winter's night.
~ William Butler Yeats, On being asked for a War Poem (1919)
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
~ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
To me it seems that one of the most important requisites for a great poet is a luminous style. The elements of poetry lie in natural objects, in the vicissitudes of human life, in the emotions of the human heart, and the relations of man to man.
~ William Cullen Bryant
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
~ William Carlos Williams, Journey to Love (1955)
The poem, to me (until I go broke) is an attempt, an experiment, a failing experiment, toward assertion with broken means but an assertion, always, of a new and total culture, the lifting of an environment to expression. Thus it is social, the poem is a social instrument.
~ William Carlos Williams
By our own spirits are we deified:
We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
~ William Wordsworth
Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.
~ William Wordsworth
Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.
~ William Wycherley
Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.
~ William Butler Yeats
I think it better that at times like these
We poets keep our mouths shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He's had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth
Or an old man upon a winter's night.
~ William Butler Yeats, On being asked for a War Poem (1919)
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
~ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
To me it seems that one of the most important requisites for a great poet is a luminous style. The elements of poetry lie in natural objects, in the vicissitudes of human life, in the emotions of the human heart, and the relations of man to man.
~ William Cullen Bryant