Poetry Quotes - page 73
[Alvine] 'Tis one of those bright fictions that have made
The name of Greece only another word
For love and poetry ; with a green earth-
Groves of the graceful myrtle - summer skies,
Whose stars are mirror'd in ten thousand streams-
Winds that move but in perfume and in music,
And, more than all, the gift of woman's beauty.
What marvel that the earth, the sky, the sea,
Were filled with all those fine imaginings
That love creates, and that the lyre preserves !
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
I would resign the words of praise which now
Make my cheek crimson and my pulses beat.
Could I but deem that when my heart is cold
And my lip passionless, my songs would be
Numbered 'mid the young minstrels' first delights,
And murmured by the lover where his suit
Calls upon poetry to breathe of love.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
The influence of a woman's first love is felt on her whole after-existence: never can she dream such dream again. For a woman there is no second-love-youth, hope, belief, are all given to her first attachment; if unrequited, the heart becomes its own Prometheus, creative, ideal, but with the vulture preying upon it for ever.-If deceived, the whole poetry of life is gone; the very essence of poetry is belief, and how can she, whose sweet eager credulity has once learnt the bitter truth-that its reliance was in vain, how can she ever believe again?
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Take the actions of our nearest friends, and how little do we know of the hopes that instigated, or of the fears that prevailed ! We sometimes cannot avoid owning that we ourselves have committed a fault, but how we gloss it over-how we take temperament and temptation into account, till at length it appears to be a thing inevitable redeemed by the regret it has occasioned, and the lesson it has given. Not so do we reason for others-then we look to the isolated fact, not to the causes: the error shuts out the excuse. The truth is, we know nothing of each other excepting by the aid of philosophy and of poetry; philosophy, that analyzes our thoughts, and poetry that expresses our feelings.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
I have all my life been an indweller of the town, and I frankly confess, for a constant residence, I like it better than all the pastoral charms that ever made the morality of an essay, or gave grace to poetry ; still there is that about the country to which the heart always turns with a feeling of freshness and renovation. The moonlight walk through the green wood, would come back upon the memory with a spell which would not belong to a lamp-lighted ramble. The green-leaf would give its freshness, the wild-flower its sweetness ; on the ear would arise the murmur of the wind in the boughs - or the song of the brook singing like a child for very gladness.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
There cannot be a greater error than to suppose that the poet does not feel what he writes. What an extraordinary, I might say, impossible view, is this to take of an art more connected with emotion than any of its sister sciences. What - the depths of the heart are to be sounded, its mysteries unveiled, and its beatings numbered by those whose own heart is made by this strange doctrine - a mere machine wound up by the clock-work of rhythm ! No ; poetry is even more a passion than a power, and nothing is so strongly impressed on composition as the character of the writer. I should almost define poetry to be the necessity of feeling strongly in the first instance, and the as strong necessity of confiding in the second.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
The favourite volume whose reading we commend, is inevitably connected with ourselves - it must bring to our image those lonely hours when the recurrence of an image has such influence - it invests that image with the associations of poetry and fiction, and thus redeems it from the common-place of ordinary life. There is also the sympathy of taste - and how much may be inferred from a passage pencilled originally for no other eyes but our own. Then, too, a book is the prettiest stepping stone to a correspondence ; it seems such a simple thing to write a note of thanks, and so natural to add some slight remark on the author ; and how often is the criticism of an author's sentiments but the expression of our own !
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
I think
of the poetry
of René Char
and all he must have seen
and suffered
that has brought him
to speak only of
sedgy rivers,
of daffodils and tulips
whose roots they water,
even to the free-flowing river
that laves the rootlets
of those sweet-scented flowers
that people the
milky
way.
William Carlos Williams
