Quotes by Poets - Page 439

I thought my fireplace dead and stirred the ashes. I burned my fingers.
Antonio Machado
Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.
Charles Baudelaire
...if you do not even understand what words say,how can you expect to pass judgementon what words conceal?
H.D.
I saw my face todayAnd it looked older,Without the warmth of wisdomOr the softnessBorn of pain and waiting.The dreams were gone from my eyes,Hope lost in hollownessOn my cheeks,A finger of deathPulling at my jaws.So I did my push-upsAnd wondered if I'd ever find you,To see my faceWith friendlier eyes than mine.
James Kavanaugh
I found the poems in the fields,And only wrote them down.
John Clare
Don't you know no one can escapethe power of creatures reaching outwith breath alone?
Marina Tsvetaeva
I'm like the weather, never really can predict when this rain cloud's gonna burst; when it's the high or it's the low, when you might need a light jacket.Sometimes I'm the slush that sticks to the bottom of your work pants, but I can easily be the melting snowflakes clinging to your long lashes.I know that some people like:sunny and seventy-five,sunny and seventy-five,sunny and seventy-five,but you take me as I am and neverforget to pack an umbrella.
Naomi Shihab Nye
And the Spring arose on the garden fair,Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breastRose from the dreams of its wintry rest.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
In fact she herself once blamed meKyprogeneiabecause I prayed this word:I want.
Sappho
I see your picture and in that picture I didn't see you.
Santosh Kalwar
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
T.S Eliot
Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.
Pablo Neruda
Escóndeme en tus brazospor esta noche sola,mientras la lluvia rompecontra el mar y la tierrasu boca innumerable.
Pablo Neruda
No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
Kahlil Gibran
If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
John Keats
Books are carefully folded forests/void of autumn/bound from the sun
Saul Williams
A fallen blossomreturning to the bough, I thought --But no, a butterfly.
Arakida Moritake
sekali berarti sesudah itu mati
Chairil Anwar
Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to aery thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two ; Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if th' other do. And though it in the centre sit, Yet, when the other far doth roam, It leans, and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home. Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like th' other foot, obliquely run ; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun.
John Donne
A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.
José Martí
One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.
Marina Tsvetaeva
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Walt Whitman
I have been happy, though in a dream.I have been happy-and I love the theme:Dreams! in their vivid colouring of lifeAs in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife
Edgar Allan Poe
Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.
Aberjhani
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!As tho’ to breathe were life!
Alfred Tennyson
So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing,and put your lips to the world.And live your life.
Mary Oliver
O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.
W.H. Auden
Those ancients who in poetry presented the golden age, who sang its happy state,perhaps, in their Parnassus, dreamt this place. Here, mankind's root was innocent; and herewere every fruit and never-ending spring; these streams--the nectar of which poets sing.
Dante Alighieri
come back so i can say yes this time do it again now that i know what to call what you didthis time i'll be ready i like it rough now and i'm done with romance i never met another man who loved me so much at first sight he had to hurt me to do it
Daphne Gottlieb
My HeartI'm not going to cry all the timenor shall I laugh all the time,I don't prefer one "strain" to another.I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,not just a sleeper, but also the big,overproduced first-run kind. I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar. And if some aficionado of my mess says "That's not like Frank!," all to the good! I don't wear brown and grey suits all the time, do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,often. I want my feet to be bare,I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--you can't plan on the heart, butthe better part of it, my poetry, is open.
Frank O'Hara
That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.
Frank O'Hara
The Children's HourBetween the dark and the daylight,When the night is beginning to lower,Comes a pause in the day's occupations,That is known as the Children's Hour.I hear in the chamber above meThe patter of little feet,The sound of a door that is opened,And voices soft and sweet.From my study I see in the lamplight,Descending the broad hall stair,Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,And Edith with golden hair.A whisper, and then a silence:Yet I know by their merry eyesThey are plotting and planning togetherTo take me by surprise.A sudden rush from the stairway,A sudden raid from the hall!By three doors left unguardedThey enter my castle wall!They climb up into my turretO'er the arms and back of my chair;If I try to escape, they surround me;They seem to be everywhere.They almost devour me with kisses,Their arms about me entwine,Till I think of the Bishop of BingenIn his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!Do you think, o blue-eyed banditti,Because you have scaled the wall,Such an old mustache as I amIs not a match for you all!I have you fast in my fortress,And will not let you depart,But put you down into the dungeonIn the round-tower of my heart.And there will I keep you forever,Yes, forever and a day,Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,And moulder in dust away!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.So I’ll tell a secret instead:poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,they are sleeping. They are the shadowsdrifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to dois live in a way that lets us find them.
Naomi Shihab Nye
When soul meets soul on lovers' lips.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:The sun-comprehending glass,And beyond it, the deep blue air, that showsNothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Philip Larkin
In my darkest night,when the moon was coveredand I roamed through wreckage,a nimbus-clouded voicedirected me:“Live in the layers,not on the litter.”Though I lack the artto decipher it,no doubt the next chapterin my book of transformationsis already written.I am not done with my changes.
Stanley Kunitz
Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,Are a substantial world, both pure and good:Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,Our pastime and our happiness will grow.
William Wordsworth
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.And be it gash or gold it will not comeAgain in this identical disguise.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.
Jorge Luis Borges
So the freshness lives onin a lemon,in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,the proportions, arcane and acerb.
Pablo Neruda
One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted — One need not be a House — The Brain has Corridors — surpassing Material Place —
Emily Dickinson
I choose to love this time for oncewith all my intelligence-from "Splittings
Adrienne Rich
Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.
Alexander Pope
Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so--go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry--without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Transtromer broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco:We got dressed and showed the houseYou live well the visitor saidThe slum must be inside you.If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry first. For it is my confirmed bias that the poets remain the most 'stunned by existence,' the most determined to redeem the world in words..
C.D. Wright
Used to be hewas my heart's desire.His forthright gaze,his expert hands:I'd lie on the couch with my eyesclosed just thinking about it.Never about the factthat everything changes,that even this,my best passion,would not be immune.No, I would bask on in aneternal daydream of the handsfinding me, the gaze like a windingstair coaxing me down. . . .Until I caught a glimpseof something in the mirror:silly girl in her lingerie,dancing with the furniture--a hot little bundle, flush withcliches. Into that pairof too-bright eyes I lookedand saw myself. And something else: would never look that way.
Deborah Garrison
Unasked, Unsought, Love gives itself but is not bought
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Out of love,No regrets--Though the goodnessBe wasted forever.Out of love,No regrets--Though the returnBe never.
Langston Hughes
Times change, as do our wills, What we are - is ever changing; All the world is made of change, And forever attaining new qualities.
Luís de Camões
A book of verses underneath the boughA flask of wine, a loaf of bread and thouBeside me singing in the wildernessAnd wilderness is paradise now.
Omar Khayyám
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
part memory part distance remainingmine in the ways that I learn to miss you
W.S. Merwin
When from our better selves we have too longBeen parted by the hurrying world, and droop,Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,How gracious, how benign, is Solitude
William Wordsworth
Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.
Sylvia Plath
The profoundest of all sensualitiesis the sense of truthand the next deepest sensual experienceis the sense of justice.
D.H. Lawrence
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
Jim Morrison
I'd rather be thin than famousbut I'm fatpaste that in your broadway show
Jack Kerouac
You have played, (I think) And broke the toys you were fondest of, And are a little tired now; Tired of things that break, and— Just tired. So am I.
E.E. Cummings
I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?
W.H. Auden
Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.
C.D. Wright