The Art of Poetry Quotes

“A rose may be a rose may be a rose; but not this one. Clearly it stands for something more.”
― Shira Wolosky, The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem

“Poetry can have varied and useful functions; and seduction is apparently something worth writing poetry for.”
― Shira Wolosky, The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem

“show the way a comparison can be thought through. We can even go further. In the opening simile, a human person, the "I," compares himself to something inanimate, a "cloud." In the metaphor that follows, something nonhuman, the daffodils, are compared to human beings, human crowds and hosts and dancers. There has been as well a question of location. The cloud floats on high; but the daffodils are down low, "beside the lake, beneath the trees." And where is the "I?" Well, not up in the sky we suppose. Yet we picture him in some sense as "high" too, as though looking down at the daffodils from above. This play on height and location is picked up in the next stanza, through the next simile of the stars: "Continuous as the stars that shine." There is the "as" declaring the simile. Number and extension again take part in the comparison. The flowers stretch on like the numberless stars in the sky. The sky itself seems to parallel the "bay" that the flowers stretch alongside-partly because of the rhyme that”
― Shira Wolosky, The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem