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Poetry Quotes by Wystan Hugh Auden
- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
- It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can…
- A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
- Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how…
- Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
- Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.
- Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.
- What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?
- Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect,…
- Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.
- My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you…
- Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
- He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;…
- Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people…
- Poetry makes nothing happen.
- The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot…
- Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
- In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet…
- But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me…
- A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.
More Poetry Quotes
- Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. — Aristotle
- Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals,… — Aristotle
- I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come… — Paul Auster
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets.… — Paul Auster
- If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. — M H Abrams
- Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things. — Matthew Arnold
- I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places. — John Ashbery
- But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me… — Chinua Achebe
- I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases… — Margaret Atwood
- The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is… — Margaret Atwood
- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. — Wystan Hugh Auden