Poetry Quote by W.H. Auden Download Open image ““no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.”” — W.H. Auden ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 2.7 out of 5 (3 ratings) Copy quoteShare Poetry Poets Writing
“A poet writes what they see every day, what they know, what they’ve lived or barely lived through.” — Jason E. Hodges Copy Share Image
“Poetry is dying first. It'll be absorbed into prose sooner or later.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald Copy Share Image
“A poet knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Leonardo da Vinci Copy Share Image
“Poetry can be a peculiar gateway, Will. It can be a way into all kinds of things that don’t seem to have a way… — Will Willingham Copy Share Image
“Stop. Watch. Listen. There’s poetry all over. And the thing about poetry? It don’t write itself.” — Bethany House Publishers Copy Share Image
“Nothing fills the world quite as poetry does. A poet need not dwell on the pagecount of his life.” — D.A. Botta Copy Share Image
“Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence; Gide, though I didn't know it then, gave part. They taught me to express my… — W.H. Auden Copy Share Image
“As his wife, Emilia must know Iago better than anybody else. She does not know, any more than the others, that he is malevolent, but she does know that her husband is addicted to practical jokes. What Shakespeare gives us in Iago is a portrait of a practical joker of a peculiarly appalling kind, and perhaps the best way of… — W.H. Auden Copy Share
“A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of… — W.H. Auden Copy Share
“No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive,… — W.H. Auden Copy Share Image
“Human "nature" is a nature continually in quest of itself, obliged at every moment to transcend what it was a moment before.” — W.H. Auden Copy Share Image
“Cassio is a ladies’ man, that is to say, a man who feels most at home in feminine company where his looks and good manners make him popular, but is ill at ease in the company of his own sex because he is unsure of his own masculinity. […] Cassio is a ladies’ man, not a seducer. With women of… — W.H. Auden Copy Share
“Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave… — W.H. Auden Copy Share Image
“In any first-class work of art, you can find passages that in themselves are extremely boring, but try to cut them out, as they… — W.H. Auden Copy Share Image
“For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a… — W.H. Auden Copy Share Image
“Our hunting fathers told the story Of the sadness of the creatures, Pitied the limits and the lack Set in their finished features; Saw… — W.H. Auden Copy Share Image
The name Phenomenal Woman was inspired by Maya Angelo, who wrote 'Phenomenal Woman', a favorite poem of mine. — Meena Harris Copy Share Image
A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the… — Samuel R. Delany Copy Share Image
The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry. — David Hare Copy Share Image
“It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper. And now that I can take it . . . now that I can finally do it . . . I'm really… — Erica Jong Copy Share
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem. — Helen Vendler Copy Share Image
All lyrical work must, as a whole, be perfectly intelligible, but in some particulars a little unintelligible. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Copy Share Image
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 have been pealing along down the centuries, and though there have been mingled the discords of warring cannon and dying men, yet to the Christian philosopher and historian - the humble listener - there has been… — James A. Garfield Copy Share