10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Art by Edith Sitwell

“The poet is the complete lover of mankind.”

“Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes, and unveils the meaning of all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the secret rays of the universe, and restores to us forgotten paradises.”

“In the Augustan age … poetry was … the sister of architecture; with the romantics, and their heightened vowel-sense, resulting in different melodic lines, she became the sister of music; in the present day, she appears like the sister of horticulture, each poem growing according to the law of its own nature.”

“I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed – it is, indeed, unavoidable.”

“Isn’t it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.”

“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.”

“Art is magic, not logic. This craze for the logical spirit in irrational shape is part of the present harmful mania for uniformity.”

“My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.”

“The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of “a moment of their other lives” – a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.”

“All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart.”

—Edith Sitwell