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The quality of poetry is not strained. It has not to abide our repeated questions. It tests and is not tested. Every true lover of poetry knows that when he cites great lines it is not the poetry but the hearer that is to be judged.

— Alice Meynell The Second Person Singular and Other Essays (1921)

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Poetry

More quotes by Alice Meynell

It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, where Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature.

The Colour of Life and Other Essays (1896)

Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind.

The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays (1893)

Compassion in the highest degree is the divinest form of religion.

What else, indeed, should mediocrity be but widespread, anywhere?

Childhood (1913)

Children appeal to us by a variant of the quality of pathos.

Children of the Old Masters (Italian School) (1903)

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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: Alice Meynell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.