in Quotes & Aphorisms (Poetry)
To some degree every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
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Poetry
I made these sonnets out of wood; I gave them the sound of that opaque pure substance, and that is how they should reach your ears. Walking in forests or on beaches, along hidden lakes, in latitudes sprinkled with ashes, you and I have picked up pieces of pure bark, pieces of wood subject to the comings and goings of water and the weather. Out of such softened relics, then, with hatchet and machete and pocketknife, I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life.
from the book "" by Pablo Neruda
in Quotes & Aphorisms (Poetry)
Logic, like lyrical poetry, is no employment for the middle-aged,.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Poetry)
Poetry is indispensable — if I only knew what for.
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For now the poet can not die,
Nor leave his music as of old,
But round him ere he scarce be cold
Begins the scandal and the cry.
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My advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world, unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die. Does this sound dismal? It isn't. It's the most wonderful life on earth. Or so I feel.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Poetry)
Nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time, and whenever we do it, we are not poets.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Poetry)
Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs--no regular hours, so many temptations!
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Poetry)
Poetry has been to me "its own exceeding great reward:" it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.
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How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? Or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections?
from the book "" by George Eliot