Poetry Quotes - page 92
I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a conceit rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk.
Sidney Lanier
Unfortunately, much of the post-Homeric poetry-called lyric poetry because it was usually sung to a lyre-was lost in the upheavals of subsequent centuries, especially in the depredations and decay that would follow the barbarian incursions into the Greco-Roman world in the fifth century A. D.
Thomas Cahill
If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur, it is certain that they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere -- probably more than the rest of the world combined. Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations -- many rare combinations. To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.
Walt Whitman
Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, has a logic of its own as severe as that of science and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets... there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
