Poetic Vision Quotes

Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.

Poets are people who can still see the world through the eyes of children.

The eye of the poet sees less clearly, but sees farther than the eye of the scientist.

I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.

There is no one more deserving of a place in Poets' Corner. Ted Hughes introduced a new kind of landscape into English poetry. The most compelling aspect of his work was his intimacy with nature.

At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.

Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.

The best poems come from the world, go through the poet, and go back in to the world.

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

It's been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they've got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all.

To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration

Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

Poems, to me, do not come from ideas, they come from a series of images that you tuck away in the back of your brain. Little photographic snapshots. Then you get the major vision of the poem, which is like a giant magnet to which all these disparate little impressions fly and adhere, and there is the poem!

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

I'm now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a seer. You won't understand any of this, and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It's really not my fault.

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.

'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' had a formative effect on me. I think it's one of those works that if you encounter it very early you're doubly enchanted by the beauty of the language and the strangeness of the vision. It stays with you.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses

The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.

[The poet] must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations, as a being superior to time and place.

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.

If the imagination is shackled, and nothing is described but what we see, seldom will anything truly great be produced either in Painting or Poetry

The astronomer who catalogues the stars cannot add one atom to the universe; the poet can call an universe from the atom.