Others

Logic and sermons never convince, The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul.

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

No, never say nothin’ without you’re compelled tu, An’ then don’t say nothin’ thet you can be held tu.

My gran’ther’s rule was safer ’n ’tis to crow: Don’t never prophesy—onless ye know.

Nature fits all her children with something to do, He who would write and can’t write, can surely review.

Nature fits all her children with something to do, He who would write and can’t write, can surely review.

There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge.

There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge.

And I honor the man who is willing to sink Half his present repute for the freedom to think, And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, Will risk t’ other half for the freedom to speak.

In creating, the only hard thing’s to begin; A grass-blade’s no easier to make than an oak.

In creating, the only hard thing’s to begin; A grass-blade’s no easier to make than an oak.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side.

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne— Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

But not without men’s hands: He could not make Antonio Stradivari’s violins Without Antonio.

But not without men’s hands: He could not make Antonio Stradivari’s violins Without Antonio.

My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.

The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed.

All poetry is difficult to read, —The sense of it is, anyhow.

The C Major of this life.

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard.

Rafael made a century of sonnets.

We’re made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see; And so they are better, painted—better to us, Which is the same thing. Art was given for that.