"Down where the lilies blow..."

JOHN KENDRICK BANGS, American poet, satirist, editor (1862 - 1922). Worked for Life, Harpers & Puck.  Inspired by Carroll's Alice, he wrote Rollo in Emblemland.

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THE LITTLE ELF

I MET a little Elf-man, once,
Down where the lilies blow.
I asked him why he was so small,
And why he didn't grow.

He slightly frowned, and with his eye
He looked me through and through.
"I'm quite as big for me," said he,
"As you are big for you!"

~ John Kendrick Bangs

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Quotations on Poetry are from FAMOUS LASTING WORDS, John Robert Colombo's Great Canadian Quotations, Douglas & McIntyre Ltd., 2000.

"Poetry is the shortest possible way of saying the sort of things I want to say."
~ Earle Birney, poet, quoted by Bruce Ward in The Toronto Star, 21 May 1978.

"How beautifully useless, / how deliciously defiant / a poem is!"
~ lines from Raymond Souster's poem "Cutting It Short."  Asking for More (1988)

"We're living in too materialistic a society.  I'd rather have a few more poets and fewer plumbers." ~ Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Prime Minister, addressing young Liberals at the University of Toronto, 23 March 1977, quoted in  The Toronto Star the following day.



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