Poetry Quotes - Page 3

One of Wordsworth's Lake District neighbours remarked upon hearing of the poet's death "I suppose his son will carry on the business."

Anonymous

Poetry is not a profession it's a destiny.

Mikhail Dudan

Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.

Stéphane Mallarmé

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poets and painters are outside the class system or rather they constitute a special class of their own like the circus people and the gypsies.

Gerald Brenan

The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's.

G.K. Chesterton

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

T.S Eliot

When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.

Robert Graves

There's no money in poetry but then there's no poetry in money either.

Robert Graves

The essentials of poetry are rhythm dance and the human voice.

Earle Birney

Colour which is the poet's wealth is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.

Henry David Thoreau

A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer he approaches lucid ground warily like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

E B White

Poetry the eldest sister of all arts and parent of most.

William Congreve

Poetry is the Devil's wine.

St. Augustine

Poetry therefore we will call Musical Thought.

Thomas Carlyle

All that is not prose passes for poetry.

George Grabbe

Oh love will make a dog howl in rhyme.

John Fletcher

Poetry is truth dwelling in beauty.

Gilfillan

Let your poem be kept nine years.

Horace

With me poetry has not been a purpose but a passion.

Edgar Allan Poe

I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The reader who is illuminated is in a real sense the poem.

H. M. Tomlinson

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Voltaire

Books on the bookshelvesAnd stacked on the floorBooks kept in basketsAnd propped by the doorBooks in neat pilesAnd in disarrayBooks tucked in closetsAnd books on displayBooks filling cranniesAnd books packed in nooksBooks massed in windowsAnd mounded in crooksLibraries beckonAnd bookstores inviteBut book-filled rooms welcomeUs back home at night!

L.R. Knost

I tell you, if you feel strange, strange things will happen to you: Fallen peacocks on library shelves

Rita Dove

Now and then I am asked as to ‘what books a statesman should read,’ and my answer is, poetry and novels – including short stories under the head of novels.

Theodore Roosevelt

If poetry dies, nothing lives !

Vihang A. Naik

Ninth Floorshe ran across the parquet slipped the flokati matcrashed the windownoshe stood at the window prism looked up at sky bruise nightspread hernoshe tilted dived swanning spinningtip-toed ink air broke fingers firstnoshe climbed the small gap the window gavehung her finger joints clotted the view with frightened breathfell ligament torn and sorrynoshe wandered to the glass hatch to watch tranquilised lights sputteringleaned too hard fell faster than a bottle of Jacknothis is how it was:drunk screaming she crashed the parquet with griefroared the ungiving window frames which gaveshe spangled spaghetti-like ribbon-voicedstreet lights crashed on herno.She did nothing.

Karin Schimke

Originality and initiative are what I ask for my country.

Robert Frost

If he had known unstructured space is a delugeand stocked his log house-boat with all the animals even the wolves, he might have floated. But obstinate hestated, The land is solid and stamped, watching his foot sink down through the stone up to his knee. From "Progressive insanities of a pioneer

Margaret Atwood

Failure is the new success.

Phil Volatile

To come up with one great sentence, one needs to serve a life sentence.

Lera Auerbach

Death defines life. I'd rather stay undefined.

Lera Auerbach

In September countless sand and house-martins jazz above the river, taking insects from the surface, from the air, thousands of birds kissing the river farewell. They creak, a sound like the air rubbing against itself. Summer is everything they know; they're preparing themselves, sensing in the shortening days a door they must dash through before it shuts.

Kathleen Jamie

And every year there is a brief, startling moment When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air: It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies; It is the changing light of fall falling on us.

Edward Hirsch

By nature, we want to be liked. We want to be accepted. But, most of the time, we allow our worth to be decided by the people on the sidelines. By people that see snapshots of our life but have no clue what the whole picture looks like.

Liz Newman

If poetry escapes my mouth then it shall seek comfort in your heart. Will you keep it safe?

Delano Johnson

In my mind he is a demon and a godand I blame him, I blame him, I blame himfor the world I created on my ownas much as the one he built around me.

Miriam Joy

Bugle"Black beetles know where the most recent bonesbake in the heat, tendons and meat long gone, bleached white, and if you give them cheap wine --drizzle a few red drops on a flat stone--they will lead you to a barren gulchsurrounded by sages and nettles, dirtburnt to powdery sand and sharp thorns. Hunchabove the skeleton, bow your head, start reciting verses you learned as a child, there, under the sun with rocks and brush, bare locust tree a telling reliquary of dust to dust, all so brutally hot. You must pull ribs from that rotting body,words that matter: love me, love me not.

Tod Marshall

As we know, Rilke, under the influence of Auguste Rodin, whom he had assisted between 1905 and 1906 in Meudon as a private secretary, turned away from the art nouveau-like, sensitized-atmospheric poetic approach of his early years to pursue a view of art determined more strongly by the priority of the object. The proto-modern pathos of making way for the object without depicting it in a manner 'true to nature', like that of the old masters, led in Rilke's case to the concept of the thing-poem - and thus to a temporarily convincing new answer to the question of the source of aesthetic and ethical authority. From that point, it would be the things themselves from which all authority would come - or rather: from this respectively current singular thing that turns to me by demanding my full gaze. This is only possible because thing-being would now no longer mean anything but this: having something to say.

Peter Sloterdijk

My exclamation mark formed into a question markIt hunched over and second-guessed itselfMaybe life is not so well understoodMaybe life is confusing after all

Michal Coret

Remember: In poetry, each word is like a loaded gun; very heavy, and full of intent

Amber Drappier

A loner by nature and an introvert... i am a twinkling star, burning bright amidst a cloudless night. As such, i tend to fade in and out of people's lives. This aspect of me is often misunderstood as rejection or a lack of love and caring. In reality, the only way i can survive as an introvert, is to drop from the sky, from time-to-time, recharging within the energizing landscape of my inner-universe. To love me, is to let me me have the space i need to illuminate the sky. I can't be taken hostage or held captive. Inner-light is what gives my star its twinkle.

Jaeda DeWalt

My wife is a lovely leathery green, the blue-tongued lizard said;Her eyes are as red as bulldog ants, lurking in holes in her head;Her body is made of the speckled grass, a violet grows on her tongue,And I could watch her for fifty years if nobody blundered along.

Douglas Stewart

All my contemporaries—hundred-and-fivers or convicts—will tell you how we livedin barely sentient fear, raisingchildren for the executioner,prison, or the torture chamber.

Anna Akhmatova

My mother's deathchanged the alchemy of food.Holidays run together nowlike ungrooved rivers. I forgetwhat they are for. I buy bakery goods.They look deadunder the blue lights.I don't do anything the way she taught mebut I get fat.I don't look like her and I don't soundlike her, but I stand like her.

Florence Weinberger

America—where we hate our fathers, love our mothers, andeveryone is hung up on tryingto be a man

Phil Volatile

A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Drinking the energy of the universeBreathing along with the CosmosWith each breathI am rebornInto a brand new existence.

Ilchi Lee

Every breath we take from the airTakes oxygen from an insect’s lungs mid-prayerAnd every exhalation does loudly declareThat in the currency of life, we’re millionaires.A butterfly flapped it’s wings and Rome fellA passerby’s whistle cracked the liberty bellAnd I dare urge the daring not to yellLest we so bid a skyscraper a rough farewell.A snake’s tongue slithered and man did sinLet me tell you how the waves from a shark’s finDid set the tides on D-Day and let the allies win;Chance and destiny are identical twins.A word was spoken and the earth createdAnother phrase and the future was dictatedAnd so every action must be carefully weightedWe just never know how things are interrelated.

Justin Wetch

...the religion of the heart is as intimate as a wish breathed to the night sky...

John Geddes

I offer you my mouth—Let me marry my lips to the tops of your thighs,I kneel between your legs. I offer you my hands—Your name written all over my palms,the fingers I press against you.I offer you my hips—My apologetic body.

Chantelle Ann

the rain in this room is low and thickand undressing my heart through the air. – intimacy

Nayyirah Waheed

Float beyond the world of trees. Out into the whispering breeze, past the rushes, past the weeds, past the marsh's waving reeds.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Then one day I found my head when I wasn't even trying.

Cat Stevens

Hello," Life says, "Remember me?We started out together hereWhen you were just a bundleOf innocent amazement.Remember how you saw the worldWith nothing but wonder?We were such rowdy playmates then.We painted on the sky with cloudsAnd made magic out of Clothespins and peanut butter.Remember, can you, how I became stained and heavyWith trouble?Not safe now. Lots of no.They dressed me in painful clothesAnd made you wear them, too.You don't recognize me, do youBut I've never abandoned youOr lost my wild, happy desireTo show you Play with youKiss youHide and seek down twisty pathsAnd always discover more.Want to run away with me again?Shall we elope without ever leavingBecause that's possible, you know.I've never been anywhere but hereWaiting for youTo remember.

Jacob Nordby

i hugged myself as a child & told Myself that everything was perfect in the petrichor The smell of pure innocence & earthy & earthly Innocence that stays in the clothes I only wear on good days…

Jay Sheets

Waldo nodded and waved goodbye pathetically, like a young father going off to war. tAs soon as the door was closed and he was gone, Jeanne squelched her own apprehensions, opened the paper and read the poem Waldo had written for her:One taste of Jeanne and out I flewWildly, madly, in no directionBut hers, and yet so straight and trueI fly towards her with no protectionIt feels so strange to move this wayThough I should land, desire it seemsMoves in strange circles and so I stayDisoriented beyond my wildest dreams.

Donald Jeffries

Winter's last rain and a light I don't recognize through the trees and I come back in my mind to the man who made me suck his cock when I was seven, in sunlight, between boxcars. I thought I could leave him standing there in the years, half smile on his lips,small hands curled into small fists,but after he finished, he held my hand in hisas if astonished, until the houses were visiblejust beyond the railyard. He held my hand but before that he slapped me hard on the face when I would not open my mouth for him. I do not want to say his whole hips slammed into me, but they did, and a black wave washed over my brain, changing me so I could not move among my people in the old way.On my way home I stopped in the churchyard to try to find a way to stay alive. In the branches a red-wing flitted, warning me. In the rectory, Father preparedthe body and the blood for mass but God could not save me from a mouthful of cum. That afternoon some lives turned away from the light. He taught me how to move my tongue around. In his hands he held my head like a lover. Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.

Bruce Weigl

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Poetry Quotes - Page 3

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