A QUOTATION EACH ON POETS AND POETRY

 

          A QUOTATION EACH ON POETS AND POETRY             

The best quotation on poets comes from the English poet-dramatist William Shakespeare (1564-1616). It reads as follows:

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, that is the madman; the lover, all as lunatic, sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt; the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling doeth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; and, as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. ---- Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 5, Sc,1.

On poetry one of the best quotations is by the American clergy William Ellery Channing  (1780-1842}.  According to him : Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feeling, revives the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the springtime of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human nature by vivid delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life.     

   To conclude, eminent  poets utter great and wise things and the best poetry is universal.

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G.R.Kanwal

2^nd May 2024