Books Quote by Janet Spens

“Most critics agree with the seventeenth-century printer who gave them to the world, that the Mutabilitie Cantos seem to be part of some following…

— Janet Spens

Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we…

— Randall Jarrell

I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived…

— Anonymous

The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word. Its strains…

— James A. Garfield

All lyrical work must, as a whole, be perfectly intelligible, but in some particulars a little unintelligible.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.

— Helen Vendler

Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the…

— Washington Irving

“In the streets, the children scream, the lovers cried, and the poets dreamed,” he crooned, putting down the metal grill tongs to take my…

— Alexandria Clarke

The word 'mundane' has come to mean 'boring' and 'dull', and it really shouldn't - it should mean the opposite. Because it comes from…

— Richard Dawkins

“It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the…

— Erica Jong

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

— David Hare

“Time gives poetry to a battlefield...”

— Graham Greene