Poet Browning Quotes & Sayings

Earth is crammed with heaven, and every bush is aflame with the glory of God. But only those who see take of their shoes; the rest just pick the berries. — Elizabeth Browning

Yet half the beast is the great god Pan, To laugh, as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man. The true gods sigh for the cost and the pain
For the reed that grows never more again As a reed with the reeds of the river. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Offered a job as book critic for Time magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely informed by Chambers that there was no place for him at the magazine. Bellow had often wondered, he told us, what he ought to have said. I suggested that he might have got the job if he'd replied that Wordsworth was a once-revolutionary poet who later became a conservative and was denounced by Browning and others as a turncoat. This seemed to Bellow to be probably right. More interesting was the related question: What if he'd kept that job? — Christopher Hitchens

God is the perfect poet. — Robert Browning

Stand still, true poet that you are! I know you; let me try and draw you. Some night you'll fail us: when afar You rise, remember one man saw you, Knew you, and named a star! — Robert Browning

I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

Sing, seraph with the glory! heaven is high.
Sing, poet with the sorrow! earth is low.
The universe's inward voices cry
"Amen" to either song of joy and woe.
Sing, seraph, poet! sing on equally! — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Who was a queen and loved a poet once
Humpbacked, a dwarf? ah, women can do that! — Robert Browning

The poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was Pippa Passes, written in 1841 and now remembered for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world." But it also contains this disconcerting passage:
Then owls and bats
Cowls and twats
Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!
Browning had apparently somewhere come across the word twat
which meant precisely the same then as it does now
but pronounced it with a flat a and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns. The verse became a source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him. — Bill Bryson

[On Elizabeth Barrett Browning:] ... for finish, and melody of versification, there is nothing approaching to Miss Barrett in this day, or in any other - also for diction. Her words paint. — Mary Russell Mitford

There's nothing great Nor small, has said a poet of our day, Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eve And not be thrown out by the matin's bell. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What does it all mean, poet? Well,
Your brains beat into rhythm, you tell
What we felt only; you expressed
You hold things beautiful the best,
And pace them in rhyme so, side by side.
'Tis something, nay 'tis much: but then,
Have you yourself what's best for men?
Are you - -poor, sick, old ere your time - -
Nearer one whit your own sublime
Than we who never have turned a rhyme?
Sing, riding's a joy! For me, I ride. — Robert Browning

Witch, scholar, poet, dreamer, and the rest... — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. — T. S. Eliot

We all have known good critics, who have stamped out poet's hopes; Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state; Good patriots, who, for a theory, risked a cause; Good kings, who disemboweled for a tax; Good Popes, who brought all good to jeopardy; Good Christians, who sat still in easy-chairs; And damned the general world for standing up. Now, may the good God pardon all good men! — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

God Himself is the best Poet, And the Real is His song. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The twelfth-century poet Abraham ibn Ezra, whom you encountered in high school as Browning's Rabbi ben Ezra (may his tribe increase), limpidly described the shlimazl's lot when he wrote: If I sold lamps, The sun, In spite, Would shine at night. — Leo Rosten