“What we call inspiration in poetry is usually a visitation of words and rhythms rather than ideas.”

— Dennis O'Driscoll

Poetry Quotes

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Dennis O'Driscoll 30

Irish poet, critic 1954–2012

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

The Summer of the Great-Grandmother (1974), p. 143

“Fancy demanding feeling from poetry! That's not the main thing at all. Radiant words, words of light, full of rhythm and music, that's poetry.”

Théophile Gautier Paris

Demander à la poésie du sentimentalisme…ce n'est pas ça. Des mots rayonnants, des mots de lumière…avec un rythme et une musique, voilà ce que c'est, la poésie.
Remark, June 22, 1863, reported in the Journal des Goncourts (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1888) vol. 2, p. 123, (ellipses in the original); Arnold Hauser (trans. Stanley Godman and Arnold Hauser) The Social History of Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951) vol. 2, p. 684.

“A painter makes patterns with shapes and colours, a poet with words. A painting may embody an ‘idea’, but the idea is usually commonplace and unimportant. In poetry, ideas count for a good deal more; but, […] the importance of ideas in poetry is habitually exaggerated: '… Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it.' [In poetry, ] the poverty of the ideas seems hardly to affect the beauty of the verbal pattern.”

G. H. Hardy book A Mathematician's Apology

A Mathematician's Apology (1941)

“To begin with, the basis of English poetry is rhythm, or, as some would prefer to call it, cadence. This rhythm is obtained by mingling stressed and unstressed syllables.”

John Gould Fletcher (1886–1950) American writer

Preface to Irradiations; Sand and Spray, 1915

“Rhythm and repetition of sounds, words and phrases make spoken poetry sound different to ordinary discourse.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

“What good poetry and good prose have in common is vitality of rhythm.”

Michael Longley (1939) poet

“For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

“Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Parnassus, Preface (1874)

“Usually, if we hate, it is the shadow of the person that we hate, rather than the substance.”

Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986) American journalist

"Hate Is Rarely a Personal Matter"
The Best of Sydney J. Harris (1975)
Context: Usually, if we hate, it is the shadow of the person that we hate, rather than the substance. We may hate a person because he reminds us of someone we feared and disliked when younger; or because we see in him some gross caricature of what we find repugnant in ourself; or because he symbolizes an attitude that seems to threaten us.

“The Koran calls for belief and consequent obedience. It is, surely, calculated to inspire fear, indeed abject terror, rather than love.”

Antony Flew (1923–2010) British analytic and evidentialist philosopher

Antony Flew, "The Terrors of Islam", Atheist Notes No. 6, 2004, ISBN 1856372928

“What we call inspiration in poetry is usually a visitation of words and rhythms rather than ideas.”

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