Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
Meaning of the quote
Poetry comes from strong emotions that you feel inside. When you take time to think about those feelings calmly, you can then express them through poems. The poet William Wordsworth is saying that poetry is a natural way to share the powerful emotions you have experienced.
About William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature. Wordsworth’s most famous work, ‘The Prelude’, is a semi-autobiographical poem about his early life that he revised and expanded over the years. He served as the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1843 until his death in 1850.
More quotes from William Wordsworth
The mind that is wise mourns less for what age takes away; than what it leaves behind.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
But an old age serene and bright, and lovely as a Lapland night, shall lead thee to thy grave.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
The human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, And shares the nature of infinity.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
In modern business it is not the crook who is to be feared most, it is the honest man who doesn’t know what he is doing.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
Wisdom is oftentimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
That best portion of a man’s life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
How does the Meadow flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free down to its root, and in that freedom bold.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
That though the radiance which was once so bright be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower. We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore; Plain living and high thinking are no more.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
The flower that smells the sweetest is shy and lowly.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
Faith is a passionate intuition.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
What is pride? A rocket that emulates the stars.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
To begin, begin.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
Golf is a day spent in a round of strenuous idleness.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
I listened, motionless and still; And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
Life is divided into three terms – that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
The child is father of the man.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign in solitude.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
The ocean is a mighty harmonist.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)
The best portion of a good man’s life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.
English Romantic poet (1770-1850)