John Keats Poet Quotations

A drainless shower Of light is poesy: 'tis the supreme of power; 'Tis might half slumbering on its own right arm.

A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

They swayed about upon a rocking horse, And thought it Pegasus.

A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.

I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.

Sweet are the pleasures that to verse belong, And doubly sweet a brotherhood in song.

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.

They shall be accounted poet kings / Who simply tell the most heart-easing things.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.