Quotes About Poetry Wordsworth

#1. She gave him books of poetry: Wordsworth, Whitman, all the W's. When she'd ask him how he liked them, he would say, "Fine. I'm on page ... " and then he would tell her what page he was on and how many pages he'd accomplished that day.

Lorrie Moore

#2. Poetry is the outcome of emotions recollected in tranquility.

William Wordsworth

#3. It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration.

William Wordsworth

#4. Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And has the nature of infinity.

William Wordsworth

#5. In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a bad man. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles and wrote bad poetry.

Bertrand Russell

#6. One moment now may give us more
Than fifty years of reason;
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.

William Wordsworth

#7. Books! tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

William Wordsworth

#8. A poet does not see or hear or feel things that others do not see or hear or feel. What makes a person a poet is the ability to recall what she has felt and seen and heard. And to relive it and describe it in such a way that others can then see and feel and hear again what they may have missed.

William Wordsworth

#9. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man.

William Wordsworth

#10. For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.

William Wordsworth

#11. The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction: not indeed For that which is most worthy to be blest - Delight and liberty, the simple creed Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest, With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast.

William Wordsworth

#12. Poetry is most just to its divine origin, when it administers the comforts and breathes the thoughts of religion.

William Wordsworth

#13. For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings...

William Wordsworth

#14. Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be ...

William Wordsworth

#15. Poetry is the image of man and nature

William Wordsworth

#16. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of knowledge

William Wordsworth

#17. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come

William Wordsworth

#18. Poetry has never brought me in enough money to buy shoestrings.

William Wordsworth

#19. I once tried hawking my own book around the pubs in the hope that, like the Salvation Army, I too could sell to the cerebrally relaxed. It was a disaster. I had beer thrown over me for being a) a nuisance, b) not as good as Wordsworth and c) a nancy for writing poetry in the first place.

Peter Finch

#20. Go to the poets, they will speak to thee
More perfectly of purer creatures

William Wordsworth

#21. Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;
Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;
Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,
The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthy.

George Gordon Byron

#22. Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.

William Collins

#23. One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

William Wordsworth

#24. Take the sweet poetry of life away, and what remains behind?

William Wordsworth

#25. to be incapable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature

William Wordsworth

#26. That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

Walter Pater

#27. When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude

William Wordsworth

#28. [ ... ]the stately and slow-moving Turk,
With freight of slippers piled beneath his arm.

William Wordsworth

#29. The eye
it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against or with our will.

William Wordsworth

#30. Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.

Oscar Wilde

#31. Laying out grounds ... may be considered as a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting ... it is to assist Nature in moving the affections ... the affections of those who have the deepest perception of the beauty of Nature ...

William Wordsworth

#32. Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago.

William Wordsworth

#33. Myriads of daisies have shone forth in flower Near the lark's nest, and in their natural hour Have passed away; less happy than the one That by the unwilling ploughshare died to prove The tender charm of poetry and love.

William Wordsworth

#34. Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good:
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.

William Wordsworth

#35. Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

William Wordsworth