Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely. "
John Drinkwater
Best
Way
Possible
Related Quotes:
" Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them. "
John Drinkwater
Poetry
Drama
Work
" Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way. "
John Drinkwater
Communication
Other
Poetry
" To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential. "
John Drinkwater
Anything
Poetry
Far
" If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry. "
John Drinkwater
Imperfect
Value
Word
" So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse. "
John Drinkwater
Kind
Poetry
Mood
" Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course. "
John Drinkwater
Life
Desire
Men
" To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely fulfills the highest function of a government - the realisation of the will of the people. "
John Drinkwater
People
Say
Kind
" When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life. "
John Drinkwater
He
Life
Makes
" But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry. "
John Drinkwater
Song
Words
Art
" It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse. "
John Drinkwater
Form
Poetry
Should
" Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just. "
John Drinkwater
Poe
Just
Poem
" We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible. "
John Drinkwater
Impossible
Best
Art
" There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and judgment, that it is so. "
John Drinkwater
Knowledge
Words
Only
" It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature. "
John Drinkwater
Two
Three
Paradise
" The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music. "
John Drinkwater
Perception
Own
Music
" For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts. "
John Drinkwater
Man
Moods
Arts
" Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events. "
John Drinkwater
Great Man
Great
Greatness
" The written word is everything. "
John Drinkwater
Word
Written Word
Written