Literature and Words

This is my letter to the World That never wrote to Me— The simple News that Nature told— With tender Majesty.

Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.

Camerado, this is no book, Who touches this touches a man.

Words! book-words! what are you?

Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia, Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts, That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath, and Aeneas’, Odysseus’ wanderings, Placard “Removed” and “To Let” on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus.

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

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.

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

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

Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us, Burns, Shelley, were with us—they watch from their graves!

The most despairing songs are the loveliest of all, I know immortal ones composed only of tears.

The bards sublime, Whose distant footsteps echo Through the corridors of Time.

Beneath the rule of men entirely great, The pen is mightier than the sword.

Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Have ye souls in heaven too, Double-lived in regions new?

Souls of Poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern? Have ye tippled drink more fine Than mine host’s Canary wine?

But strength alone though of the Muses born Is like a fallen angel: trees uptorn, Darkness, and worms, and shrouds, and sepulchers Delight it; for it feeds upon the burrs And thorns of life; forgetting the great end Of poesy, that it should be a friend To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.

Of light is poesy; ’tis the supreme of power; ’Tis might half slumb’ring on its own right arm.

O for ten years, that I may overwhelm Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed That my own soul has to itself decreed.

The poetry of earth is never dead.

How many bards gild the lapses of time!

’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, Should let itself be snuff’d out by an article.

The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece! 6 Where burning Sappho loved and sung.

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, He would have written sonnets all his life?