The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.

About This Quote

Many people know how to speak, read, and write poetry. Fewer people know how to draw or paint or write music. The idea behind this quote is that most people are not taught the basic skills necessary to create art. By the time most kids grow up, they have rarely spent time learning how to draw or play music, but they are expected to be able to write poetry. If these skills are not taught in school, then it is unlikely that anyone will ever develop them on their own.

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1. Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. - Wallace Stevens

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2. To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you. Be whole in everything. Put all you are Into the smallest thing you do. So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor Because it blooms up above. - Fernando Pessoa

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3. The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it. - Jane Kenyon

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4. Truth is a friendthat asks for loyaltyand acceptancethen it enters our heartsdissolving the boundariesfreeing us from lonliness - Nirmala

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5. Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness. - Kahlil Gibran

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More Quotes By W.h. Auden

1. We must love one another or die

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2. He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

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3. If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.

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4. I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious...

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5. Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.

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