Poetry

I shoot an arrow in the air. ... It falls to Earth, and I know where. Poetry for physicists.
~ Bill Amend, Fox Trot

The world is full of poetry; the air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.
~ William Ralston Balch, in Perfect Jewels: A Collection Of The Choicest Things In The Literature Of Life, Love And Religion (1884). Preface

Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.
~ William Rose Benét, Man Possessed. Preface

One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, The Divine Vision.
~ William Blake, Annotations To Wordsworth's 1815 Edition Of His Poems (1826).

Only the poet has any right to be sorry for the poor, if he has anything to spare when he has thought of the dull, commonplace rich.
~ William Bolitho, from Camera Obscura (1930).

Negro poetic expression hovers for the moment, pardonably perhaps, over the race problem, but its highest allegiance is to Poetry it must soar.
~ William Stanley Braithwaite

Eloquence is the poetry of prose; poetry is the eloquence of verse.
~ William Cullen Bryant, Lectures on Poetry before the New York Athenaeum (April 1825; published in 1884). Lecture I. On the Nature of Poetry

Poetry that is unfeeling and indifferent to suffering is no poetry at all.
~ William Cullen Bryant, Lectures on Poetry before the New York Athenaeum (April 1825; published in 1884). Lecture II. On the Value and Uses of Poetry

To me it seems that one of the most important requisites for a great poet is a luminous style. The elements of poetry lie in natural objects, in the vicissitudes of human life, in the emotions of the human heart, and the relations of man to man.
~ William Cullen Bryant, in A Library of Poetry and Song (1870). Introduction

Most joyful let the Poet be;
It is through him that all men see.
~ William Ellery Channing, the younger, from Poems, Second Series (1846). The Poet of the Old and New Times

I'm not dismayed that poetry's appeal is limited in scope. That's why we have National Poetry Month. It's a sign of its neglect, which isn't necessarily a negative thing. It's not like we have National TV Month.
~ Billy Collins, in The Kansas City Star (21 December 2002). Billy Collins at Bloomsday

Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.
~ Billy Collins, in The New York Times (30 November 1997).

Poetry is the history of the human heart, and it continues to record the history of human emotion, whether it's celebration or grief or whatever it may be.
~ Billy Collins, in Contra Costa Times (1 October 2001). Armed with verse

Of those few fools who with ill stars are curst,
Sure scribbling fools, called poets, fare the worst:
For they're a sort of fools which fortune makes,
And, after she has made 'em fools, forsakes.
~ William Congreve, The Way of the World (1700). Prologue

Poetry, the eldest sister of all arts, and parent of most.
~ William Congreve, The Way of the World (1700). Dedication

Poets have an undoubted right to claim,
If not the greatest, the most lasting name.
~ William Congreve, in The Poetical Register; Or, The Lives And Characters Of All The English Poets, Volume II (1723).

Turn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but a poet; for a poet is worse, more servile, timorous and fawning than any I have named.
~ William Congreve, Love for Love (1695). Act I, scene ii

[A] volume of verse is a fiddle that puts the universe in motion.
~ William Cowper, in The Life and Posthumous Writings of William Cowper, Esq., Volume I (1803). Letter LI: To Lady Hesketh (17 April 1786)

I play with syllables, and sport in song.
~ William Cowper, from Poems by William Cowper of the Inner Temple, Esq. (1782). Table Talk (written in 1781)

Made poetry a mere mechanical art.
~ William Cowper, from Poems by William Cowper of the Inner Temple, Esq. (1782). Table Talk (written in 1781)

Nature indeed looks prettily in rhyme.
~ William Cowper, from Poems by William Cowper of the Inner Temple, Esq. (1782). Retirement

There is a pleasure in poetic pains
Which only poets know.
~ William Cowper, The Task (1785). Book II. The Time-Piece

To make verse speak the language of prose, without being prosaic, to marshal the words of it in such an order as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary speaker, yet without meanness, harmoniously, and without seeming to displace a single syllable for the sake of rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake.
~ William Cowper, Letter to the Revd. William Unwin (17 January 1782)

I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country.
~ Will (William Jacob) Cuppy

[H]ow much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable) who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of a historian.
~ Sir William Davenant, Gondibert (1651). Preface. To His Much Honoured Friend, Mr. Hobbes

[P]oetry, like sanctity, is the orchestration of multiple attributes into vast, compelling wholes.
~ William Everson (aka Brother Antoninus), in Earth Poetry: Selected Essays & Interviews of William Everson, 1950/1977 (1980).

[A]ll that is worth remembering in life is the poetry of it.
~ William Hazlitt, from Lectures on the English Poets (1818). Lecture I. -- Introductory. On Poetry in General

[T]he essence of poetry is will and passion.
~ William Hazlitt, in Winterslow, Essays and Characters Written There (1850). On Means and Ends

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
~ William Stanley (W.S.) Merwin, in The New York Times Magazine (19 February 1995). A Poet of Their Own

The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

You can't live bunny lives and write tiger poetry, simultaneously.
~ William Packard, The Art of Poetry Writing (1992). Chapter 1. History of Poetry

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.
~ Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution (1936).

The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.
~ Frederick William (F.W.) Robertson

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
~ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Act V, scene i

The truest poetry is the most feigning;
and lovers are given to poetry; and what they swear in poetry
may be said, as lovers, they do feign.
~ William Shakespeare, As You Like It. Act III, scene iii

A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
~ William Stafford, from Writing the Australian Crawl (1978). What It Is Like

As for sound, I live in one great bell of sound when doing a poem; and I like how the syllables do-si-do along. I am not after rhyme -- so limited, so mechanical. No, I want all the syllables to be in there like a school of fish, flashing, relating to other syllables in other words (even words not in this poem, of course), fluently carrying the reader by subliminal felicities all the way to the limber last line.
~ William Stafford, You Must Revise Your Life (1986).

If you let your thought play, turn things this way and that, be ready for liveliness, alternatives, new views, the possibility of another world -- you are in the area of poetry.
~ William Stafford, from Writing the Australian Crawl (1978). What It Is Like

Poetry is the kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your eye. You can be too well prepared for poetry. A conscientious interest in it is worse than no interest at all. ... It's like a very faint star. If you look straight at it you can't see it, but if you look a little to one side it is there.
~ William Stafford, from Writing the Australian Crawl (1978). What It Is Like

It seems to me those verses shine like the stars.
~ William Makepeace Thackeray, from The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century: A Series of Lectures (1853). Lecture the Second

God on his throne is
Eldest of poets;
Unto His measures
Moveth the Whole.
~ William Watson, England, My Mother (1892).

The glorious riddle of his rhythmic breath,
His might, his spell, we know not what they be;
We only feel, whate'er he uttereth,
This savors not of death,
This hath a relish of eternity.
~ William Watson, The Sovereign Poet (1894).

The poem -- saith the poet -- wanders free
Till I betray it to captivity.
~ William Watson, from Epigrams of Art, Life and Nature (1884). LXXXIV

Hence no force, however great, can stretch a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line which is accurately straight: there will always be a bending downwards.
~ William Whewell, Elementary Treatise on Mechanics (1819).

The proper business of Epic poetry is to extend our ideas of human perfection, or, as the critics express it, to excite admiration.
~ William Wilkie, The Epigoniad (1757). Preface

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.
~ George F. Will

By listening to the language of his locality the poet learns his craft. It is his function to lift, by the use of his imagination ... his environment to the sphere ... where they will have a new currency.
~ William Carlos Williams

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.
~ William Carlos Williams

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
~ William Carlos Williams, from Journey to Love (1955). Asphodel, That Greeny Flower

[N]othing whips my blood like verse.
~ William Carlos Williams, in The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams (1957). Letter to Marianne Moore, dated August 30, 1928

Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.
~ William Carlos Williams, in Howl and Other Poems, by Allen Ginsberg (1956). Introduction

The poem, to me (until I go broke) is an attempt, an experiment, a failing experiment, toward assertion with broken means but an assertion, always, of a new and total culture, the lifting of an environment to expression. Thus it is social, the poem is a social instrument.
~ William Carlos Williams

I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.
~ Edmund Wilson

The Poets of old declared -- what every Poet's heart has felt -- that the Real is not the True.
~ William Wilson, A Little Earnest Book Upon a Great Old Subject (1851). Chapter XII

There is a certain sense in which religion is the only theme of important poetry.
~ William K. Wimsatt, Jr., in New Scholasticism (January 1958).

Poetry is the language of feeling.
~ William Winter, from The Actor, And Other Speeches (1891). The Comrade (Speech at the Annual Dinner of the Green-Room Club of London; 3 June 1888)

A poet who has not produced a good poem before he is twenty-five, we may conclude cannot, and never will do so.
~ William Wordsworth, in Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858).

All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.
~ William Wordsworth, from Lyrical Ballads (1798). Preface

And mighty poets in their misery dead.
~ William Wordsworth, from Poems in Two Volumes, Volume I (1807). Poems Composed During A Tour, Chiefly on Foot. 5. Resolution and Independence

And, through the turnings intricate of verse,
Present themselves as objects recognised,
In flashes, and with glory not their own.
~ William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850 edition). Book V: Books

Blessings be with them -- and eternal praise,
Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares.
~ William Wordsworth, from Poems in Two Volumes, Volume II (1807). Personal Talk. Concluded

By our own spirits are we deified:
We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
~ William Wordsworth, from Poems in Two Volumes, Volume I (1807). Poems Composed During A Tour, Chiefly on Foot. 5. Resolution and Independence

He is the rock of defence for human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love.
~ William Wordsworth, from Lyrical Ballads (1800 edition). Preface

It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind. The evidence of this fact is to be sought, not in the writings of Critics, but in those of Poets themselves.
~ William Wordsworth, from Lyrical Ballads (1798). Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads

[Poetry] contains a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents.
~ William Wordsworth, from Lyrical Ballads (1798). Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads

Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge -- it is as immortal as the heart of man.
~ William Wordsworth, from Lyrical Ballads (1800 edition). Preface

Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.
~ William Wordsworth, from Lyrical Ballads (1800 edition). Preface

The Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.
~ William Wordsworth, from Lyrical Ballads (1800 edition). Preface

The true poet ascends to receive knowledge; he descends to impart it.
~ William Wordsworth, in Conversations at Cambridge (1836). The Poet Wordsworth And Professor Smythe

Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.
~ William Wycherley, The Plain Dealer (1674). Prologue

A poet is a good citizen turned inside out.
~ William Butler Yeats, in Memoirs. Autobiography -- First Draft Journal (1972).

But where's the wild dog that has praised his fleas?
~ William Butler Yeats, To a Poet, Who would have Me Praise certain bad Poets, Imitators of His and of Mine (1910).

Even when the poet seems most himself ... he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.
~ William Butler Yeats, Essays and Introductions (1961). A General Introduction for my Work

I think it better that at times like these
We poets keep our mouths shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He's had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth
Or an old man upon a winter's night.
~ William Butler Yeats, On being asked for a War Poem (1919).

Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top.
~ William Butler Yeats, from Last Poems (1938-39). Under Ben Bulben

[I]t takes fifty years for a poet's weapons to influence the issue.
~ William Butler Yeats, in The Letters of W.B. Yeats (1954).

Poets are the policemen of language, they are always arresting those old reprobates the words.
~ William Butler Yeats, in The letters of W.B. Yeats (1954).

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
~ William Butler Yeats, from Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918). Anima Hominis. V