Poet Quotes - Page 3

In our society of fixed texts and printed words, it is the function of the poet to see the life value of the facts round about, and to deify them, as it were, to provide images that relate the everyday to the eternal.

Beneath it allI kept faith with Ithaca, travelled,Travelled and travelled,Suffering much, enjoying a little;Met strange people singingNew myths; made myths myself.But this lion of the seaSalt-maned, scaly, wondrous of tail,Touched with power, insistentOn this brief promontory...Puzzles.

Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.

People worship god.I worship this separation from you.It is worth Haj to a hundred Meccas,This separation from you.People say I am as brilliant as the sun,They say I am famous.What a fire it has lit in me,This separation from you.Behind me is my shadow,Ahead, is my darkness.I fear that it might leave me,This separation from you.No taint of the body is in it,Nor litter of the mind,All has been winnowed out,By this separation from you.When sorrow comes, bringing with itLoneliness and pain,I pull it close to me,This separation from you.Sometimes it colors my wordsSometimes it weaves through my songs,It has taught me great deal,This separation from you.When sorrow, defeated, fell at my feet,Amazed at my fidelity,The world came out to seeThis separation from you.Love earned me fame.People flocked to praise me.It wept in my embrace,This separation from you.The world turned out to tell me,That I had been unwise.It sat me on a throne todayThis separation from you.

Think not of the fragility of life, but of the power of books, when mere words can change our lives simply by being next to each other.

And if other old men must be willing, at the end, to push up off their deathbed and adventure out into the unknown, how much more willing must that man be whose whole life has been just such a daily exercise of adventuring, even in the stillness of his own garden? I mean, the poet.

The moon is my fear.The sun is my heart afire.The stars, my love songs.

If movements were a spark every dancer would desire to light up in flames.

Be calm...calm as a calm lagoon, then you will look beautiful as a beautiful calm lagoon crowned by the Moon and sheltered by the brilliance of the stars reclaiming your royalty of regal life...

She placed her hand on her chest and thought, 'So this is what the poets write about'.

A poetess is a collection of unfinished thoughts. She is a tormented phantom, a harbinger of life and death. Those who peer deep inside her catacombs will learn that even madness is a virtue.

Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem.

Question not, but live and labourTill yon goal be won,Helping every feeble neighbour,Seeking help from none;Life is mostly froth and bubble,Two things stand like stone,Kindness in another's trouble,Courage in your own.

To live day by dayIs not to live at all.

He informed Byrdie that his social engineering ambitions betrayed all the delusions of grandeur that you might expect from the son of a poet.

Love is like a magic trickYou know you are getting fooled, but still, you stand in lineAnd pay to see it again and again.

It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense.

Write as an audience member. Write what you want to see, feel and hear.

In the days of Prismatic Colornot in the days of Adam and Eve, but when Adam was alone; when there was no smoke and color was fine, not with the refinement of early civilization art, but because of its originality; with nothing to modify it but the mist that went up, obliqueness was a variation of the perpendicular, plain to see and to account for: it is no longer that; nor did the blue-red-yellow band of incandescence that was color keep its stripe