Poetical Quotes

My father died and left me his blessing and his business. His blessing brought no money into my pocket, and as to his business, it soon deserted me, for I was busy writing poetry, and could not attend to law, and my clients, though they had great respect for my talents, had no faith in a poetical attorney. ~ Washington Irving

There is nothing intrinsically more beautiful or poetical about the moon than about a dunghill; if anything, the contrary, for the latter is full of life and warmth and energy. ~ Reginald Horace Blyth

I do not attach
any exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life is
there to be lived rather than to be written about. My aim
is to search out the manifold experience that it offers,
wringing from each moment what of emotion it presents.
I look upon my writing as a graceful accomplishment
which does not absorb but rather adds pleasure to
existence. And as for posterity - damn posterity. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Melancholy is ... the most legitimate of all the poetical tones. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile, because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or at least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion. If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove's high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it. ~ Herman Melville

I heard there was a riot.'

'There was a demonstration, which I think is different. It was peaceful until it was interrupted.'

Mason seemed to be thinking hard about it.

'What sort of demonstration?'

'Hmm... A new kind. It looked poetical at first but then became rather poletical. ~ Jean-Christophe Valtat

What are the precise characteristics of an epigram it is not easy to define. It differs from a joke, in the fact that the wit of the latter dies in the words, and cannot therefore be conveyed in another language; while an epigram is a wit of ideas, and hence, is translatable. Like aphorisms, songs and sonnets, it is occupied with some single point, small and manageable; but whilst a song conveys a sentiment, a sonnet a poetical, and an aphorism a moral reflection, an epigram expresses a contrast. ~ William Matthews

There is indeed a poetical attitude to be adopted towards all things, but all things are not fit subjects for poetry. Into the secure and sacred house of Beauty the true artist will admit nothing that is harsh or disturbing, nothing that gives pain, nothing that is debatable, nothing about which men argue. He can steep himself, if he wishes, in the discussion of all the social problems of his day, poor-laws and local taxation, free trade and bimetallic currency, and the like; but when he writes on these subjects it will be, as Milton nobly expressed it, with his left hand, in prose and not in verse, in a pamphlet and not in a lyric. This exquisite spirit of artistic choice was not in Byron: Wordsworth had it not. In the work of both these men there is much that we have to reject, much that does not give us that sense of calm and perfect repose which should be the effect of all fine, imaginative work. But in Keats it seemed to have been incarnate, and in his lovely ODE ON A GRECIAN URN it found its most secure and faultless expression; in the pageant of the EARTHLY PARADISE and the knights and ladies of Burne-Jones it is the one dominant note. It is to no avail that the Muse of Poetry be called, even by such a clarion note as Whitman's, to migrate from Greece and Ionia and to placard REMOVED and TO LET on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus. Calliope's call is not yet closed, nor are the epics of Asia ended; the Sphinx is not yet silent, nor the fountain of Castaly dry. For art i ~ Oscar Wilde

Love's secrets, being mysteries, ever pertain to the transcendent and the infinite; and so they are as airy bridges, by which ourfurther shadows pass over into the regions of the golden mists and exhalations; whence all poetical, lovely thoughts are engendered, and drop into us, as though pearls should drop from rainbows. ~ Herman Melville

Rain's pouring and it's too cold.
All people bored and I even accord
What to do but spell a tale told:
So once upon a time a land in the shore... ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

There are enough in the novelty business without us; and we have something better to do. We have to give an account unto our God of what we do and say, and if we have been murderers of souls, it will be no excuse that we flourished the dagger well, or that when we gave them poison we mixed the draught cleverly, and presented it with poetical phrases. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The art of the writer, like that of the player, is attained by slow degrees. The power of distinguishing and discriminating comick characters, or of filling tragedy with poetical images, must be the gift of nature, which no instruction nor labour can supply; but the art of dramatick disposition, the contexture of the scenes, the involution of the plot, the expedients of suspension, and the strategems of surprise, are to be learned by practice. ~ Samuel Johnson

Sorrow, it is said, will make even an oyster feel poetical. I never tried my hand at that sort of writing but on this particular occasion such was my state of feeling, that I began to fancy myself inspired; so I took pen in hand, and as usual I went ahead. ~ Davy Crockett

Every limited mind demands a certain freedom of expression, and the man who cannot express himself satisfactorily without the stimulation derived from the spirited mode of two centuries ago should certainly be permitted to follow without undue restraint a practice so harmless, so free from essential error, and so sanctioned by precedent, as that of employing in his poetical compositions the smooth and inoffensive allowable rhyme. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

But the reason we fly from the city is not in reality that it is not poetical; it is that its poetry is too fierce, too fascinating and too practical in its demands. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Fragment of the Elegy on the Death of Bion
From the Greek of Moschus
Published from the Hunt manuscripts by Forman, "Poetical Works of P. B. S.", 1876.
Ye Dorian woods and waves, lament aloud,
Augment your tide, O streams, with fruitless tears,
For the beloved Bion is no more.
Let every tender herb and plant and flower,
From each dejected bud and drooping bloom,
Shed dews of liquid sorrow, and with breath
Of melancholy sweetness on the wind
Diffuse its languid love; let roses blush,
Anemones grow paler for the loss
Their dells have known; and thou, O hyacinth,
Utter thy legend now - yet more, dumb flower,
Than 'Ah! alas!' - thine is no common grief
Bion the [sweetest singer] is no more.
NOTE:
_2 tears]sorrow (as alternative) Hunt manuscript ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

He who travels much has this advantage over others – that the things he remembers soon become remote, so that in a short time they acquire the vague and poetical quality which is only given to other things by time. He who has not traveled at all has this disadvantage – that all his memories are of things present somewhere, since the places with which all his memories are concerned are present. ~ Giacomo Leopardi

Mud is the most poetical thing in the world. ~ Reginald Horace Blyth

A glass of absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world. What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset? ~ Oscar Wilde

the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose.

This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These thing ~ G.K. Chesterton

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly required than a defence of bores. When Byron divided humanity into the bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself. The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical. The bored has certainly proved himself prosaic. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner. ~ William Hazlitt

If you can't give me poetry, can't you give me poetical science? ~ Ada Lovelace

Wherever modern Science has exploded a superstitious fable or even a picturesque error, she has replaced it with a grander and even more poetical truth. ~ George Perkins Marsh

There is so much poetry, and yet nothing is more rare than a poetic work. This is what the masses make out of poetical sketches, studies, aphorisms, trends, ruins, and raw material. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks. ~ Oscar Wilde

Women are not as sentimental as men, and are not so easily touched with the unspoken poetry of nature, being less poetical, and having less imagination; they are more fitted for practical affairs, and would make fewer failures in business. ~ Charles Dudley Warner

I know no subject more elevating, more amazing, more ready to the poetical enthusiasm, the philosophical reflection, and the moral sentiment than the works of nature. Where can we meet such variety, such beauty, such magnificence? ~ James Thomson

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn't have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn't have to be a walk during which you'll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don't find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn't make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be. ~ Albert Camus

Mythology is not religion. It may rather be regarded as the ancient substitute, the poetical counterpart, for dogmatic theology. ~ Augustus William Hare

Were I to throw my thoughts on this subject," said my good father-in-law, as he began to enter more warmly into the debates, drawing his chair opposite Worthy, and raising his hand with a poetical enthusiasm - "Were I to throw my thoughts on this subject into an Allegory, I would describe the human mind as an extensive plain, and knowledge as the river that should water it. If the course of the river be properly directed, the plain will be fertilized and cultivated to advantage; but if books, which are the sources that feed this river, rush into it from every quarter, it will overflow its banks, and the plain will become inundated: When, therefore, knowledge flows on in its proper channel, this extensive and valuable field, the mind, instead of being covered with stagnant waters, is cultivated to the utmost advantage, and blooms luxuriantly into a general efflorescence - for a river properly restricted by high banks, is necessarily progressive. ~ William Hill Brown

Homer's Hymn to the Moon

Published by Mrs. Shelley, "Poetical Works", 1839, 2nd edition; dated 1818.
Daughters of Jove, whose voice is melody,
Muses, who know and rule all minstrelsy
Sing the wide-winged Moon! Around the earth,
From her immortal head in Heaven shot forth,
Far light is scattered - boundless glory springs;
Where'er she spreads her many-beaming wings
The lampless air glows round her golden crown.

But when the Moon divine from Heaven is gone
Under the sea, her beams within abide,
Till, bathing her bright limbs in Ocean's tide,
Clothing her form in garments glittering far,
And having yoked to her immortal car
The beam-invested steeds whose necks on high
Curve back, she drives to a remoter sky
A western Crescent, borne impetuously.
Then is made full the circle of her light,
And as she grows, her beams more bright and bright
Are poured from Heaven, where she is hovering then,
A wonder and a sign to mortal men.

The Son of Saturn with this glorious Power
Mingled in love and sleep - to whom she bore
Pandeia, a bright maid of beauty rare
Among the Gods, whose lives eternal are.

Hail Queen, great Moon, white-armed Divinity,
Fair-haired and favourable! thus with thee
My song beginning, by its music sweet
Shall make immortal many a glorious feat
Of demigods, with lovely lips, so well
Which minstre ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
~ Jean Cocteau

I have myself a poetical enthusiasm for pigs, and the paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings. But it is only men, especially wise men, who discuss whether pigs can fly; we have no particular proof that pigs ever discuss it. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

It was a lovely landscape. It was idyllic, poetical, and it inspired me. I felt good and noble. I felt I didn't want to be sinful and wicked anymore. I would come and live here, and never do any more wrong, and lead a blameless, beautiful life, and have silver hair when I got old, and all that sort of thing. ~ Jerome K. Jerome

You are in love, at a point where pride and apprehension scuffle within you. Part of you wants time to slow down: for this, you say to yourself, is the best period of your whole life. I am in love, I want to savour it, study it, lie around in languor with it; may today last forever. This is your poetical side. However, there is also your prose side, which urges time not to slow down but hurry up. How do you know this is love, your prose side whispers like a sceptical lawyer, it's only been around for a few weeks, a few months. You won't know it's the real thing unless you (and she) still feel the same in, oh, a year or so at least; that's the only way to prove you aren't living a dragonfly mistake. Get through this bit, however much you enjoy it, as fast as possible; then you'll be able to find out whether or not you're really in love. ~ Julian Barnes

The question, is it true? can be asked of anything we read. It is applicable to every kind of writing, in one or another sense of "truth" -- mathematical, scientific, philosophical, historial and poetical. No higher commendation can be given any work of the human mind than to praise it for the measure of truth it has achieved; by the same token, to criticize it adversely for its failure in this respect is to treat it with the seriousness that a serious work deserves. ~ Mortimer J. Adler

There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is – revolting. It's mere vomiting. ~ G.K. Chesterton

It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars. ~ Aristotle.

Nature is a vast tablet, inscribed with signs, each of which has its own significancy, and becomes poetry in the mind when read; and geology is simply the key by which myriads of these signs, hitherto indecipherable, can be unlocked and perused, and thus a new province added to the poetical domain. ~ Hugh Miller

Where faith commences, science ends. Both these arts of the human mind must be strictly kept apart from each other. Faith has its origin in the poetic imagination; knowledge, on the other hand, originates in the reasoning intelligence of man. Science has to pluck the blessed fruits from the tree of knowledge, unconcerned whether these conquests trench upon the poetical imaginings of faith or not. ~ Ernst Haeckel

Nearly always in Dutch painting and often in the works of Giorgione or Titian, it is entirely independent of anything definitely poetical in the subject, a kind of form and choice in workmanship which is itself entirely satisfying, and is (as the Greeks would say) an end in itself. ~ Oscar Wilde

I find by this, how much an author injures his works by altering them, even though they be improved in a poetical point of view. The first impression is readily received. We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things; and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavour to efface them. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I was entering moods I knew were bad for me. Poetical moods. ~ Randy Attwood

What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne - we may stop there. Of these, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men, and of these three, Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly well to do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were University men: which means that somehow or other they procured the means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well to do, and I challenge you that, if he had not been well to do, he would no more have attained to write Saul or The Ring and the Book than Ruskin would have attained to writing Modern Painters if his father had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a mad-house, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is - however dishonouring to us as a nation - certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hund ~ Virginia Wolf

Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out - I don't care what you'll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself. ~ Albert Camus

There is to the poetical sense a ravishing prophecy and winsome intimation in flowers that now and then, from the influence of mood of circumstance, reasserts itself like the reminiscence of childhood, or the spell of love. ~ Henry Theodore Tuckerman

Edgar Allan Poe once called the death of a beautiful woman "the most poetical topic in the world" and I've often found myself wondering how many woman writers who have killed themselves or let themselves be otherwise obliterated were trying, somehow, to fulfill this most popular of narratives. We're most valuable when we're smiling, dead, posing, our words hanging on the page with no real body behind them. I'm ~ Jessica Valenti

When we read with attention the poetical and philosophical monuments of the East
above all, those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe
we discover there many a truth, and truths so profound, and which make such a contrast with the meanness of the results at which European genius has sometimes stopped, that we are constrained to bend the knee before the philosophy of the East, and to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy. ~ Victor Cousin

But there exist other, different, methods of infolding-obliquity, compression, and the Seven Types of Ambiguity-a modest estimate of Empson's. The later Joyce, for instance, makes one realize why the German word for writing poetry is 'dichten'- to condense (certainly more poetical than 'composing', i.e. 'putting together'; but perhaps less poetical than the Hungarian kolteni-to hatch). Freud actually believed that to condense or compress several meanings or allusions into a word or phrase was the essence of poetry. It is certainly an essential ingredient with Joyce; almost every word in the great monologues in Finnegans Wake is overcharged with allusions and implications. To revert to an earlier metaphor, economy demands that the stepping stones of the narrative should be spaced wide enough apart to require a significant effort from the reader; Joyce makes him feel like a runner in a marathon race with hurdles every other step and aggravated by a mile-long row of hieroglyphs which he must decipher. Joyce would perhaps be the perfect writer-of the perfect reader existed. ~ Arthur Koestler

The cap was gone and the man dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of gas was only a rumor, faint and stale. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn
that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness
that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling. ~ Jane Austen

To the traveller imbued with a feeling for the historical and poetical, so inseparately interwined in the annals of romantic Spain, the Alhambra is a much an object of devotion as is the Caaba to all true Moslems. How many legends and traditions, true and fabulous, - how many songs and ballards, Arabian and Spanish, of love and war and chivalry, are associated with this Oriental pile! ~ Washington Irving

But perhaps the most poetical thing Pompeii has yielded to modern research, was that grand figure of a Roman soldier, clad in complete armor; who, true to his duty, true to his proud name of a soldier of Rome, and full of the stern courage which had given to that name its glory, stood to his post by the city gate, erect and unflinching, till the hell that raged around him burned out the dauntless spirit it could not conquer. We never read of Pompeii but we think of that soldier; we can not write of Pompeii without the natural impulse to grant to him the mention he so well deserves. Let us remember that he was a soldier
not a policeman
and so, praise him. Being a soldier, he staid,
because the warrior instinct forbade him to fly. Had he been a policeman he would have staid, also
because he would have been asleep. ~ Mark Twain

When I examine my mind and try to discern clearly in the matter, I cannot satisfy myself that there are any such things as poetical ideas. No truth, it seems to me, is too precious, no observation too profound, and no sentiment too exalted to be expressed in prose. The utmost I could admit is that some ideas do, while others do not, lend themselves kindly to poetical expression; and that those receive from poetry an enhancement which glorifies and almost transfigures them, and which is not perceived to be a separate thing except by analysis. ~ A.E. Housman

The truth, I am convinced, is that there is no longer a poetical audience among the higher class of minds, that moral, political, and physical science have entirely withdrawn from poetry the attention of all whose attention is worth having; and that the poetical reading public being composed of the mere dregs of the intellectual community, the most sufficing passport to their favour must rest on the mixture of a little easily-intelligible portion of mawkish sentiment with an absolute negation of reason and knowledge. ~ Thomas Love Peacock

The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical. ~ H.L. Mencken

It is my belief that many who think they dislike poetry are really poetical in their natures and are indebted to it, more than they imagine, for the success they may have achieved, even in practical pursuits, and for the enjoyment their lives have afforded them. ~ Orson F. Whitney

Two bodies attract each other directly as the product of their masses and inversely as the square of their distance.' It sounds like a rule for simple physical facts, does it not? Yet it is nothing of the sort; it was the poetical way the old ones had of expressing the rule of propinquity which governs the emotion of love. The bodies referred to are human bodies, mass is their capacity for love. Young people have a greater capacity for love than the elderly; when thy are thrown together they fall in love, yet when they are separated they soon get over it. 'Out of sight, out of mind.' It's as simple as that. But you were seeking some deep meaning for it. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

It was nearly as long as a minister's and so poetical. But ~ L.M. Montgomery

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances though frequent, were somewhat monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment - from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distractions now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema. In "Brave New World" non-stop distractions of ~ Aldous Huxley

Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanized age I am as little able to understand my environment as any primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might from a poetical point of view be correct. ~ Rebecca West

A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself: If I'm not careful, something of this kind may happen to me! ~ M.R. James

I could need you in many ways yet I don't; I love you in many ways. It is peculiar. I need you only in the sense that you need yourself. I don't expect anything to be mutually intense among us. I somehow like the thought of being the one who is feeling already more than one should. But I need you to believe that you are distinctively refreshing. And uncommon. And intriguing. It is an extreme oddity of mine but I need you to believe that. Call it a form of paranoia; I know that I am feeding your ego right now. Call it self-defense; I am putting in words your uniqueness in an attempt to explain to my own self why is it that I adore you. The truth is: You shine out like the sun shines out and you melt away all my intentions of a fatal, whatsoever, description regarding what is it exactly that you do. There is no exactness. See, it takes suns and miraculous imagery to slightly sketch you in words whereas you probably are as complex as an impressionist painting of impeccable quality. You continually provoke my blatantly awful poetical instincts; that is for sure. ~ Katherine Mansfield

The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened. ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

Science-Fiction, in which the revealed truths of Science may be given interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true." - from A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject in 1851. ~ William Wilson

Now I could appreciate the merits of a broad, poetical, powerful interpretation, or rather it was to this that those epithets were conventionally applied, but only as we give the names of Mars, Venus, Saturn to planets which have nothing mythological about them. We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the gap. ~ Marcel Proust

With Christians, a poetical view of things is a duty. We are bid to color all things with hues of faith, to see a divine meaning in every event. ~ John Henry Newman

(...) an inner feeling called "Stimmung" by the germans and best translated as sentiment (it is to be regreted that this word, sentiment, which is meant to describe the poetical efforts of an artist living soul, has been misused and finally, ridiculed. Was there ever a great word that the masses did not try immediatly to cheapen and desecrate?) (...) ~ Wassily Kandinsky

We wished to go to the Ambrosian Library, and we did that also. We saw a manuscript of Virgil, with annotations in the handwriting of Petrarch, the gentleman who loved another man's Laura, and lavished upon her all through life a love which was a clear waste of the raw material. It was sound sentiment, but bad judgment. It brought both parties fame, and created a fountain of commiseration for them in sentimental breasts that is running yet. But who says a word in behalf of poor Mr. Laura? (I do not know his other name.) Who glorifies him? Who bedews him with tears? Who writes poetry about him? Nobody. How do you suppose he liked the state of things that has given the world so much pleasure? How did he enjoy having another man following his wife every where and making her name a familiar word in every garlic-exterminating mouth in Italy with his sonnets to her pre-empted eyebrows? They got fame and sympathy--he got neither. This is a peculiarly felicitous instance of what is called poetical justice. It is all very fine; but it does not chime with my notions of right. It is too one-sided--too ungenerous. ~ Mark Twain

You can hardly imagine how I am struggling to exert my poetical ideas just now for the discovery of analogies & remote figures respecting the earth, Sun & all sorts of things-for I think it is the true way (corrected by judgement) to work out a discovery. ~ Michael Faraday

The poet will be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet is always in revolt."
"There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. ~ G.K. Chesterton

If human beings could communicate in mathematical language -- which is more poetical than any other language -- the world would be an easier place to live. Perhaps one day we will follow Nature's example, for her immense book is written in mathematical language, as Galileo has affirmed. ~ Fariba Hachtroudi

But these vague whisperings may arise from Mr. Snagsby's being, in his way, rather a meditative and poetical man; loving to walk in Staple Inn in the summer time; and to observe how countrified the sparrows and the leaves are ... and to remark (if in good spirits) that there were old times once, and that you'd find a stone coffin or two, now, under that chapel, he'd be bound, if you was to dig for it. ~ Charles Dickens

Marriage is a sort of poetical see-saw. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

Of all kinds of ambition, that which pursues poetical fame is the wildest ~ Oliver Goldsmith

If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year. ~ Alice Meynell

It is with extreme sadness that we hear of the passing of the leader of the world's Catholics, His Holiness Pope John Paul II, who commanded the three paths of religious learning, philosophical thought and poetical and artistic creativity. ~ Mohammad Khatami

We always cut our poetical theories to suit our talent ... ~ Madame De Stael

From Vergil's Tenth Eclogue

Verses 1-26.

Published by Rossetti, "Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.", 1870, from the Boscombe manuscripts now in the Bodleian. Mr. Locock ("Examination", etc., 1903, pages 47-50), as the result of his collation of the same manuscripts, gives a revised and expanded version which we print below.
Melodious Arethusa, o'er my verse
Shed thou once more the spirit of thy stream:
Who denies verse to Gallus? So, when thou
Glidest beneath the green and purple gleam
Of Syracusan waters, mayst thou flow
Unmingled with the bitter Doric dew!
Begin, and, whilst the goats are browsing now
The soft leaves, in our way let us pursue
The melancholy loves of Gallus. List!
We sing not to the dead: the wild woods knew
His sufferings, and their echoes...
Young Naiads,...in what far woodlands wild
Wandered ye when unworthy love possessed
Your Gallus? Not where Pindus is up-piled,
Nor where Parnassus' sacred mount, nor where
Aonian Aganippe expands...
The laurels and the myrtle-copses dim.
The pine-encircled mountain, Maenalus,
The cold crags of Lycaeus, weep for him;
And Sylvan, crowned with rustic coronals,
Came shaking in his speed the budding wands
And heavy lilies which he bore: we knew
Pan the Arcadian.

...

'What madness is this, Gallus? Thy heart's care
With willing steps pursues another there ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm in them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death. ~ Plato

Such was also the case with Nietzsche, a volcanic genius if ever there was one. Here, too, there is passionate exteriorization of an inward fire, but in a manner that is both deviated and demented; we have in mind here, not the Nietzschian philosophy, which taken literally is without interest, but his poetical work, whose most intense expression is in part his 'Zarathustra'. What this highly uneven book manifests above all is the violent reaction of an a priori profound soul against a mediocre and paralyzing cultural environment; Nietzsche's fault was to have only a sense of grandeur in the absence of all intellectual discernment. 'Zarathustra' is basically the cry of a grandeur trodden underfoot, whence comes the heart-rending authenticity – grandeur precisely – of certain passages; not all of them, to be sure, and above all not those which express a half-Machiavellian, half-Darwinian philosophy, or minor literary cleverness. Be that as it may, Nietzsche's misfortune, like that of other men of genius, such as Napoleon, was to be born after the Renaissance and not before it; which indicates evidently an aspect of their nature, for there is no such thing as chance. ~ Frithjof Schuon

Our friends were not poetical, and the sight suggested to them no metaphors of human destiny; they thought only of the wonderful efficiency of it all. ~ Upton Sinclair

It is impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather. ~ George Eliot

I do not mean to say that we should, or could, return to traditional nomadic economies. I do mean to say that there are systems of knowledge and grand poetical schemata derived from the mobile life that it would be foolish to disregard or underrate. And mad to destroy. ~ Robyn Davidson

In most cases the name is unpoetical, although the fact is poetical. In the case of Smith, the name is so poetical that it must be an arduous and heroic matter for the man to live up to it. The name of Smith is the name of the one trade that even kings respected; it could claim half the glory of that arma virumque which all epics acclaimed. The spirit of the smithy is so close to the spirit of song that it has mixed in a million poems, and every blacksmith is a harmonious blacksmith.

Even the village children feel that in some dim way the smith is poetic, as the grocer and the cobbler are not poetic, when they feast on the dancing sparks and deafening blows in the cavern of that creative violence. The brute repose of Nature, the passionate cunning of man, the strongest of earthly metals, the weirdest of earthly elements, the unconquerable iron subdued by its only conqueror, the wheel and the ploughshare, the sword and the steam-hammer, the arraying of armies and the whole legend of arms, all these things are written, briefly indeed, but quite legibly, on the visiting-card of Mr. Smith. ~ G.K. Chesterton

There is some reason to believe that when a man does not write his poetry it escapes by other vents through him, instead of the one vent of writing; clings to his form and manners, whilst poets have often nothing poetical about them except their verses. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Of all races and eras these States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets, ~ Walt Whitman

Sydney, I rather despair of making myself intelligible to you, because you are such an insensible dog." "And you," returned Sydney, busy concocting the punch, "are such a sensitive and poetical spirit - ~ Charles Dickens

No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

This frequently happened. Dantes, cast from solitude into the world, frequently experienced an imperious desire for solitude; and what solitude is more complete, or more poetical, than that of a ship floating in isolation on the sea during the obscurity of the night, in the silence of immensity, and under the eye of heaven? ~ Alexandre Dumas

When the last living thing Has died on account of us, How poetical it would be If Earth could say, In a voice floating up Perhaps From the floor Of the Grand Canyon, "It is done." People did not like it here. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The poetical term fête galante refers to a new genre of paintings and drawings that blossomed in the early 18th century during the [French] Regency period (1715-1723) and whose central figure was Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). Inspired by images of bucolic merrymaking in the Flemish tradition, Watteau and his followers created a new form, with a certain timelessness, characterised by greater subtlety and nuance.

These depict amorous scenes in settings garlanded with luxuriant vegetation, real or imaginary: idealised dancers, women and shepherds are shown engaged in frivolous pursuits or exchanging confidences. The poetical and fantastical atmospheres that are a mark of his work are accompanied by a quest for elegance and sophistication characteristic of the Rococo movement, which flourished during the Age of Enlightenment, evidenced in his flair for curved lines and light colours.

The flexibility of the fête galante theme proved to be an invitation to experimentation and innovation, and the genre was to inspire several generations of artists, occupying a central place in French art throughout the 18th century. Works by other highly creative painters, such as François Boucher (1703-1770) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), illustrate their very personal visions of the joys of the fête galante as first imagined by Watteau. ~ Christoph Vogtherr

If you have ever seen a dragon in a pinch, you will realize that this was only poetical exaggeration applied to any hobbit, even to Old Took's great-granduncle Bullroarer, who was so huge (for a hobbit) that he could ride a horse. He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their king Golfibul's head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf was invented at the same moment. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical. ~ William Shakespeare

Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours. ~ Tom Stoppard