in Quotes & Aphorisms (Poetry)
If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so I'm sure it's a good one, and the same goes for paintings.
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Poetry
If you like poetry let it be first-rate; Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, Goldsmith, Pope (if you will, though I don't admire him), Scott, Byron, Campbell, Wordsworth, and Southey. Now don't be startled at the names of Shakespeare and Byron. Both these were great men, and their works are like themselves. You will know how to choose the good and avoid the evil; the finest passages are always the purest, the bad are invariably revolting, you will never wish to read them over twice.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Poetry)
Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. In that case, you ask me, of what use is it? Of no use. Who will see it? No one. Which does not prevent it from being an outrage to modesty, though its exhibitionism is squandered on the blind. It is enough for poetry to express a personal ethic, which can then break away in the form of a work. It insists on living its own life. It becomes the pretext for a thousand misunderstandings that go by the name of glory...
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Poetry)
In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Poetry)
In all comic metres, the gulping of short syllables, and the abbreviation of syllables, are not so much a license as a law.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Poetry)
Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that, in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the performance of a trained dog on very shaky ground.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Poetry)
Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.
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I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Poetry)
The poets down here don't write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be.
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Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.
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