Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away Nor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry — This Traverse may the poorest take Without opress of Toll — How frugal is the Chariot That bears the Human soul
The poetry of the earth is never dead.
The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it.
That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.
Poetry, I feel is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space, you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but getting it onto paper is something that unfortunately doesn’t go as readily as looking.[De poezij omgeeft ons overal doch het op papier brengen er van is iets wat helaas niet zoo grif gaat als het kijken.]
Poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.