Books Quote by Henry David Thoreau

Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting…

— Herman Melville

poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of…

— Vernon Lee

“The poem or the discovery exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation; for the appreciator…

— Jacob Bronowski

“Poets don’t run out of material the way novelists do because they don’t depend on material in the same way.”

— Julian Barnes

“The writer sensitive to language finds his own metaphors, not simply because he has been taught to avoid clichés but because he enjoys finding…

— John Gardner

“The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as…

— Aristotle

“A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are,…

— Oscar Wilde

Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what…

— Dana Gioia

Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the…

— Dana Gioia

Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.

— Wallace Stevens

Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought…

— James Broughton

“The poet is individual—he is complete in himself: the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and they do not.”

— Walt Whitman