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For Poetry is the wisdom of the blood,
That scarlet tree within, which has the power
To make dull words bud forth and burst in flower.

— Osbert Sitwell

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Notes from Wikiquote

These lines were repeatedly drawn on by Sitwell in his later works.

Topics

Poetry

More quotes by Osbert Sitwell

Everywhere men have unlocked the prisoners within, and from under the disguising skins the apes have leapt joyfully out.

The artist, like the idiot or clown, sits on the edge of the world, and a push may send him over it.

Educ[ated]: during the holidays from Eton.

Entry in Who's Who (1929)

Evil and ugliness are the same thing, and dullness is the mother of both.

For most of the well-to-do in the town, dinner was a shibboleth, its hour dividing mankind.

All Osbert Sitwell quotes →

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Osbert Sitwell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.