Poets Quotes - Page 2

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those that do.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Wallace Stevens

A good poet is someone who manages in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning five or six times.

Randall Jarrell

Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

Robert Penn Warren

When a great poet has lived certain things have been done once for all and cannot be achieved again.

T.S Eliot

Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.

No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

T.S Eliot

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is prose - words in their best order poetry - the best words in their best order.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

Christopher Morley

Science is for those who learn poetry for those who know.

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

George Santayana

Reason respects the differences and imagination the similitudes of things.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The poet's mind is ... a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings phrases images which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

T.S Eliot

Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.

William Butler Yeats

Poetry is a mug's game.

T.S Eliot

A poem begins with a lump in the throat a homesickness or alovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

A drainless shower of light is poesy 'tis the supreme of power 'tis might half slumb'ring on its own right arm.

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved the Inquisition might have let him alone.

In poetry you must love the words the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Wallace Stevens

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

What was it Like?""What was what like?" he said, although he knew."Quick, I imagine. But you must have perceived something. A split second of vanishing awareness. A grasping at a shrinking light." "It was like being fucked in the brain.

Max Barry

What’s the use of writing poetry for your peers? I don’t think I should sell my poetry to other poets. If that’s who my audience is, I’m dead, I’m not going to make any money.

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

Poets are simply those who have made a profession ans a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.

Joseph Campbell

Miltons were, on the whole, the most enthusiastic poet followers. A flick through the London telephone directory would yield about four thousand John Miltons, two thousand William Blakes, a thousand or so Samuel Colleridges, five hundred Percy Shelleys, the same of Wordsworth and Keats, and a handful of Drydens. Such mass name-changing could have problems in law enforcement. Following an incident in a pub where the assailant, victim, witness, landlord, arresting officer and judge had all been called Alfred Tennyson, a law had been passed compelling each namesake to carry a registration number tattooed behind the ear. It hadn't been well received--few really practical law-enforcement measures ever are.

The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.

The Chinese poet George Wu ... recorded on his comlog: "Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become." Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: "Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

Poets sing our human music for us.

Carol Ann Duffy

He is smitten on the brain, -he reads and writes verses! I caught him in the act! Fools might say he was inspired; but I know it is the first and worst symptom of lunacy. All other maniacs have lucid intervals; some are curable; but the madness of poets, dogs, and musicians, is past hope. Earth possesses no remedy, science no cure.

Edward John Trelawny

Poets can't march in protest or do that sort of thing. I feel that's against the rules, and pointless. If mankind wants a great big final bang, that's what it'll get. One should never protest against anything unless it's going to have an effect. None of those marches do. One should either be silent or go straight to the top.

I used to know Brian Howard well -- a dazzling young man to my innocent eyes. In later life he became very dangerous -- constantly attacking people with his fists in public places -- so I kept clear of him. He was consumptive but the immediate cause of his death was a broken heart.

...when a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was...this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.

Did you know that Bharatiyar used the pen name “Shelley-dasan”? He admired the poems of Shelley so deeply that he wrote under the name “Shelley’s servant”. Wasn’t that a wonderful gesture of humility by someonewho was such a great poet himself? And later, Bharatiyar had his own dasan, the poet Subburathinam, who tookthe pen name Bharathidasan. Subburathinam’s poetry inspired yet another poet who wrote as Surada, short for Subburathina-dasan. And to think this long chain of inspiration spans centuries, going back to the poets who inspired Wordsworth, who inspired Shelley, who inspired our own Bharati.

Indu Muralidharan

For the way of the comets is the poet's way.

Marina Tsvetaeva

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The poet must be more useful than any other member if his tribe.

Comte de Lautréamont

The poets carry feelings, delivering desires and dispatching dreams. Even if sometimes they need pack some sorrows, distill several disappointments and filter strange nightmares.

J.B.Alves

Repetita iuvant. Italy, a land of great saints, poets, sailors, artists, statesmen, businessmen, lawyers, intellectuals, professors, journalists, whores, gangsters, religious parasites and dickheads.

Carl William Brown

There are poets,there are philosophers, there are spiritualists and me. I try to foot the bill of these mighty three.

Stanley Victor Paskavich

There are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them... Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

Gary D. Schmidt

Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.

Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.

Fernando Pessoa

A poet is a musician that can't sing. Words have to find a man's mind before they can touch his heart, and some men's minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly no matter how small or stubborn the mind of the man who listens.

Patrick Rothfuss

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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