John Drinkwater Quotes

24 quotes in 367 categories

• Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.
• It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the…
• If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.
• A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds…
• Grant us the wil1 to fashion as we feel, Grant us the strength to labor as we know, Grant us the purpose, ribbed and edged…
• There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge…
• This be my pilgrimage and goal Daily to march and find The secret phrases of the soul, The evangels of the mind.
• And not a girl goes walking Along the Cotswold lanes But knows men's eyes in April Are quicker than their brains.
• Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into…
• Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.
• The written word is everything.
• But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.
• For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all…
• It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.
• When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.
• Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality…
• The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of…
• The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best…
• To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even…
• To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely fulfills the…

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