“A poem round and perfect as a star.”

— Alexander Smith

Scene 2.
A Life Drama and other Poems (1853)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A poem round and perfect as a star." by Alexander Smith?

Alexander Smith 14

Scottish poet and essayist 1829–1867

Related quotes

“You are all just perfect little satellites
Spinning round and round this broken Earthy life”

Sara Bareilles (1979) American pop rock singer-songwriter and pianist

"Satellite Call"
Lyrics, The Blessed Unrest (2013)

“The golden guess
Is morning-star to the full round of truth.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

Columbus, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

The Paris Review, "Writers at Work: 4th series," interview with Peter Buckman and William Fifield (1969).
General sources

“I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.”

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

“She's kind of a walking poem, she's this perfect beauty… but at the same time very deep, very smart.”

Johnny Depp (1963) American actor, film producer, and musician

“All in the waning light she stood,
The star of perfect womanhood.”

Lewis Carroll Three Sunsets and Other Poems

Three Sunsets (1861), st. 1
Three Sunsets and Other Poems (1898)

“As the diamond is the crystalline Revelator of the achromatic white light of Heaven, so is a perfect poem the crystalline revelation of the Divine Idea.”

Thomas Holley Chivers (1809–1858) 19th century American poet

Preface to Eonchs of Ruby.

“I cannot say where you are. Unreachable
by prayer, even if poems are prayers. Unseeable
in the air, even if souls are stars.”

Carol Ann Duffy (1955) British writer and professor of contemporary poetry

Death and the Moon, from Feminine Gospels (2002).

“For those denounced by their smug, horrible children
For a peppermint-star and the praise of the Perfect State,
For all those strangled, gelded or merely starved
To make perfect states”

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) poet, short story writer, novelist

Litany for Dictatorships (1935)
Context: For those denounced by their smug, horrible children
For a peppermint-star and the praise of the Perfect State,
For all those strangled, gelded or merely starved
To make perfect states; for the priest hanged in his cassock,
The Jew with his chest crushed in and his eyes dying,
The revolutionist lynched by the private guards
To make perfect states, in the names of the perfect states.

“People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

From the poem "Sheep in Fog", 2 December 1962, 28 January 1963”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“A poem round and perfect as a star.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Alexander Smith 14

Related quotes

Related topics