Eloquence is the poetry of prose.
Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.
~Milton.~--His poetry reminds us of the miracles of Alpine scenery. Nooks and dells, beautiful as fairy land, are embosomed in its most rugged and gigantic elevations. The roses and myrtles bloom unchilled on the verge of the avalanche.--_Macaulay._
The poetry of speech.
We will say, therefore, that poetry is an art which is supremely potent for the blind, and the painting has the same result on the deaf. Painting, therefore, excels poetry in proportion as the sense to which it ministers is the nobler. The only true function of the poet is to represent the words of people who talk among each other, and these alone he represents to the hearing as if they were natural, because they are natural in themselves and created by the human voice; and in all other respects he is surpassed by the painter. Still more, incomparably greater is the width of range of painting than that of speech, because the painter can accomplish an infinity of things which speech will not be able to name for want of the appropriate terms. And seest thou not that if the painter wishes to depict animals and devils in Hell with what richness of invention he proceeds?
The essence of poetry is will and passion.
It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and metre. The written poem is only poetry _talking_, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry _acting_. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains which he himself could never hope to hear.--_Ruskin._
Simonides calls painting silent poetry, and poetry speaking painting.
Durch Vernunfteln wird Poesie vertrieben / Aber sie mag das Vernuftige lieben=--Poetry loves what is true in reason, but is scared away (dispersed) by subtlety in reasoning.
All high truth is poetry. Take the results of science: they glow with beauty, cold and hard as are the methods of reaching them.--_Charles Buxton._
Ye Gods! annihilate but space and time, And make two lovers happy.
For he who fights and runs away May live to fight another day; But he who is in battle slain Can never rise and fight again.
In the hands of genius the driest stick becomes an Aaron's rod, and buds and blossoms out in poetry.
Every age has its pleasures, its style of wit, and its own ways.
There is a beauty in discovery. There is mathematics in music, a kinship of science and poetry in the description of nature, and exquisite form in a molecule. Attempts to place different disciplines in different camps are revealed as artificial in the face of the unity of knowledge. All literate men are sustained by the philosopher, the historian, the political analyst, the economist, the scientist, the poet, the artisan and the musician.
It requires a great deal of poetry to gild the pill of poverty.
It is a very good world to live in, To lend, or to spend, or to give in; But to beg or to borrow, or to get a man's own, It is the very worst world that ever was known. Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
Reality, if rightly interpreted, is grander than fiction; nay, it is in the right interpretation of reality and history that poetry consists.
Happy who in his verse can gently steer From grave to light, from pleasant to severe.
Whoso, without poetic frenzy, knocks at the doors of the Muses, presuming that his art alone will suffice to make him a poet, both he and his poetry are hopelessly thrown away.
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, — all in one.
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some with you.--_Joubert._
The true environment of the moral life is God. Here conscience wakes. Here kindles love. Duty here becomes heroic; and that righteousness begins to live which alone is to live forever. But if this Atmosphere is not, the dwarfed soul must perish for mere want of its native air. And its Death is a strictly natural Death. It is not an exceptional judgment upon Atheism. In the same circumstances, in the same averted relation to their environment, the poet, the musician, the artist, would alike perish to poetry, to music, and to art. Natural Law, p. 171.
Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity as to suggest a wealth that beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, have no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock.
You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckaback why it does not make cashmere, as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical discovery from that jobber.
We spent them not in toys, in lusts, or wine, But search of deep philosophy, Wit, eloquence, and poetry; Arts which I lov'd, for they, my friend, were thine.
Thou sayest that science increases in nobility in proportion as the subjects with which it deals are more elevated, and, for this reason, a false rendering of the being of God is better than the portrayal of a less worthy object; and on this account we will say that painting, which deals alone with the works of God, is worth more than poetry, which deals solely with the lying imaginings of human devices.
The history of Christ is as surely poetry as it is history, and in general, only that history is history which might also be fable.--_Novalis._
In two verses of poetry, Al-Mutanabbi, one of the greatest Arabian poets and philosophers, reduces the number of happy men to three classes. They have been paraphrased and put into English verse by a friend, as follows:
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
Sentimental literature, concerned with the analysis and description of emotion, headed by the poetry of Byron, is altogether of lower rank than the literature which merely describes what it saw.
Painting manifests its essence to thee in an instant of time,--its essence by the visual faculty, the very means by which the perception apprehends natural objects, and in the same duration of time,--and in this space of time the sense-satisfying harmony of the proportion of the parts composing the whole is formed. And poetry apprehends the same things, but by a sense inferior to that of the eyesight, which bears the images of the objects named to the perception with greater confusion and less speed. Not in such wise acts the eye (the true intermediary between the object and the perception), for it immediately communicates the true semblance and image of what is represented before it with the greatest accuracy; whence that proportion arises called harmony, which with sweet concord delights the sense in the same way as the harmony of diverse voices delights the ear; and this harmony is less worthy than that which delights the eye, because for every part of it that is born a part dies, and it dies as fast as it is born. This {74} cannot occur in the case of the eye; because if thou presentest a beautiful living mortal to the eye, composed of a harmony of fair limbs, its beauty is not so transient nor so quickly destroyed as that of music; on the contrary it has permanent duration, and allows thee to behold and consider it; and it is not reborn as in the case of music which is played many times over, nor will it weary thee: on the contrary, thou becomest enamoured with it, and the result it produces is that all the senses, together with the eye, would wish to possess it, and it seems that they would wish to compete with the eye: it appears that the mouth desires it for itself, if the mouth can be considered as a sense; the ear takes pleasure in hearing its beauty; the sense of touch would like to penetrate into all its pores; the nose also would like to receive the air it exhales.
There is no religion in the whole world which in simplicity, in purity of purpose, in charity, and true humanity, comes near to that religion which Christ taught to His disciples. And yet that very religion, we are told, is being attacked on all sides. The principal reason for this omnipresent unbelief is, I believe, the neglect of our foundations, the disregard of our own bookless religion, the almost disdain of Natural Religion. Even bishops will curl their lips when you speak to them of that natural and universal _religion_ which existed before the advent of our historical religions, nay, without which all historical religions would have been as impossible as poetry is without language. Natural religion may exist and does exist without revealed religion--revealed religion without natural religion is an utter impossibility.
Painting ministers to a nobler sense than poetry, depicts the forms of the works of nature with greater truth than poetry; and the works of nature are nobler than the words which are the works of man, because there is the same proportion between the works of man and those of nature as there is between man and God. Therefore it is a more worthy thing to imitate the works of nature, which are the true images embodied in reality, than to imitate the actions and the words of men.
True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.
His eyes were blued steel, lined in coal and cut through with silver. They were like clouds and storms and all the things she’d never understood about poetry and romance novels.
The world of thought must remain apart from the world of action, for if they once coincided the problem of life would be solved, and the hope which we call heaven would be realised on earth. And therefore men "Are cradled into poetry by wrong; / They learn in suffering what they teach in song."
You'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them — if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.
From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness,--a system in which the two great commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's wife.
History is the true poetry.
~Poetry.~--Poetry is the apotheosis of sentiment.--_Madame de Staël._
The poetry of the ancients was that of possession, ours is that of aspiration; the former stands fast on the soil of the present, the latter hovers between memory and anticipation.
Romance, like a ghost, eludes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but is poetry in memory.
There is poetry and beauty in the common lives about us, if we look at them with imaginative and sympathetic eye.
Angling is somewhat like poetry,--men are to be born so.
Not only all common speech, but science, poetry itself, is no other, if thou consider it, than right naming.
The poetry of earth is never dead.
What I object to is, not the poetry of sadness, but the sadness of poetry. Many of the poets make out the fountain of poetry to be only a fountain of tears.
Words are rather the drowsy part of poetry; imagination the life of it.
The idea of global unity is not new, but the absolute necessity of it has only just arrived, like a sudden radical alteration of the sun, and we shall have to adapt or disappear. If the nations are ever to make a working synthesis of their ferocious contradictions, the plan will be created in spirit before it can be formulated or accepted in political fact. And it is in poetry that we can refresh our hope that such a unity is occupying people's imaginations everywhere, since poetry is the voice of spirit and imagination and all that is potential, as well as of the healing benevolence that used to be the privilege of the gods.
I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far.
The poet must believe in his poetry. The fault of our popular poetry is that it is not sincere.
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry speaking painting.
Lyrical poetry is much the same in every age, as the songs of the nightingales in every spring-time.
Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.
But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
The spectacles of books.
Only that is poetry which purifies and mans me.
Show me one wicked man who has written poetry, and I will show you where his poetry is not poetry; or rather, I will show you in his poetry no poetry at all.
Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let him read in the "Faery Queen."
Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!... In our aspirations to be great, / Our destinies o'erleap their mortal state, / And claim a kindred with you; for ye are / A beauty and a mystery, and create / In us such love and reverence from afar, / That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves a star.
We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.
Nothing which does not transport is poetry. The lyre is a winged instrument.--_Joubert._
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.
The imagination does not perceive such excellent things as the eye, because the eye receives the images or semblances from objects, and transmits them to the perception, and from thence to the brain; and there they are comprehended. But the imagination does not issue forth from the brain, with the exception of that part of it which is transmitted to the memory, and in the brain it remains and dies, if the thing imagined is not of high quality. And in this case poetry is formed in the mind or in the imagination of the poet, who depicts the same objects as the painter, and by reason of the work of his fancy he wishes to rival the painter, but in reality he is greatly inferior to him, as we have shown above. Therefore with regard to the work of fancy we will say that there is the same proportion between the art of painting and that of poetry as exists between the body and the shadow proceeding from it, and the proportion is still greater, inasmuch as the shadow of such a body at least penetrates to {122} the brain through the eye, but the imaginative embodiment of such a body does not enter into the eye, but is born in the dark brain. Ah! What difference there is between imagining such a light in the darkness of the brain and seeing it in concrete shape set free from all darkness.
We by our art can be called the grandsons of God. If poetry deals with moral philosophy, painting deals with natural philosophy; if poetry describes the action of the contemplative mind, painting represents the effect in motion of the action of the mind; if poetry terrifies people with the pictures of Hell, painting does the same by depicting the same things in action. If a poet challenges the painter to represent beauty, fierceness, or an evil, an ugly or a monstrous thing, whatever variety of forms he may produce in his way, the painter will cause greater satisfaction. Are there not pictures to be seen so like reality that they deceive men and animals?
Perhaps there are no warmer lovers of the muse than those who are only permitted occasionally to gain her favors. The shrine is more reverently approached by the pilgrim from afar than the familiar worshiper. Poetry is often more beloved by one whose daily vocation is amid the bustle of the world. We read of a fountain in Arabia upon whose basin is inscribed, "Drink and away;" but how delicious is that hasty draught, and how long and brightly the thought of its transient refreshment dwells in the memory!--_Tuckerman._
Our best history is still poetry.
True love ennobles and dignifies the material labors of life; and homely services rendered for love's sake have in them a poetry that is immortal.
Made poetry a mere mechanic art.
As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
I will have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love. Love above all. No... not the artful postures of love, not playful and poetical games of love for the amusement of an evening, but love that... overthrows life. Unbiddable, ungovernable — like a riot in the heart, and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture. Love — like there has never been in a play.
True religion is the poetry of the heart; it has enchantments useful to our manners; it gives us both happiness and virtue.
Means not, but blunders round about a meaning; And he whose fustian 's so sublimely bad, It is not poetry, but prose run mad.
In a poem there should be not only the poetry of images, but also the poetry of ideas.
When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.
Human beings are divided into mind and body. The mind embraces all the nobler aspirations, like poetry and philosophy, but the body has all the fun.
The Bible: It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.
The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another, and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is imagination, and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.--_Shelley._
You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear, that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. "What is this Truth you seek? What is this Beauty?" men will ask, with derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, "As others do, so will I. I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season." — then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history; and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect. … Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from every object in Nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom.