Poets Quotes - Page 2

Poetry can take you places that were once only traveled by your imagination.

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.

Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings — stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again.

It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing - otherwise everything and everyone would be speaking once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to things. Rilke privileges two categories of 'entities' [Seienden), to express it in the papery diction of philosophy, that are eligible for the lofty task of acting as message-things - artifices and living creatures - with the latter gaining their particular quality from the former, as if animals were being's highest works of art before humans. Inherent to both is a message energy that does not activate itself, but requires the poet as a decoder and messenger.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skilfully.

Silken strings composing the harpsichord of life accommodate a score of emotional tidings. An orchestra of linked heartbeats strumming the melodious prose of our collective intones gives rise to sonnets of melancholy, producing an illimitable libretto stretching from the milky dawn of newborn’s amaranth life to the speckled sunsets of gentle souls whom we cherish.

For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet

For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

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.

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.

love is my thighs,this belly,my eyes.love is my speech,the search,my cry.love is myself in the mirror.i will see love every time.

Hope without love is hopeless.

I want to tell you why poetry is worth thinking about - from time to time. Not all the time. Sometimes it's a much better idea to think about other things.Most of us have a short period of intense thinking about poetry, when we take a class in college, and then that's about it. And that's really all you need. One intense time, when you master your little heap of names - Andrew Marvel, Muriel Rukeyser, Christina Rosetti, Hardy, Auden, Bishop, Marvin Bell, Ted Hughes, John Hollander, Nicholas Christopher, Deborah Garrison, whoever, James Wright, Selima Hill, Troy Jollimore. Whoever they may be. Every so often you remember them. If you've memorised some poems, the poems will raise a glimmering finger in your memory once in a while, and that's very nice, as long as you keep it to yourself. Never recite. Please! If you recite, your listeners will look down and play with their cuticles. They will not like you. But sometimes if you quote just a phrase in passing, that can work. Like this: "As Selima Hill says: 'A really good fuck makes me feel like custard.

Feminine psychology is admittedly odd, sir. The poet Pope...""Never mind about the poet Pope, Jeeves.""No, sir.""There are times when one wants to hear all about the poet Pope and times when one doesn't.""Very true, sir.

someday i will walk under the soul-blossom tree with my hand eternally woven in yours.

From oriole to crow, note the declineIn music. Crow is realist. But, then,Oriole, also, may be realist.

Without space, there is no time.

For a moment at least, be a smile on someone else’s face.

Criticism is like politics: if you don't make your own you are by default accepting the status quo and are finally yourself responsible for whatever the status quo does to you.

Therefore, since the world has stillMuch good, but much less good than ill,And while the sun and moon endureLuck's a chance, but trouble's sure,I'd face it as a wise man would,And train for ill and not for good.

August is dust here. Droughtstuns the road,but juice gathers in the berries.

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body and reduce it to harmony.

We built tall buildings, but we have not become any taller.

All good poems are victories over something.

You touched my heart...ever so softlyand I realizedtears had never been...merely saltand the rainOh the Rain!had never been merely water.

A single poem, alonecan turn tidesscatter galaxiesand burst forth with riversfrom paradise.

I act as the tongue of you,... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened.

A Poet never denies creativity entrance.

Musicians do not get on stage without hearing the song singing inside of them. Poets do not write as if they are jotting down a sermon, they see everything in their subconscious before presenting it to the conscious, which they later turn to  readable materials. Artist do not draw and paint without painting in dream states, trance, or see an art form that others do not see. Being creative does not calls for being any supernatural entity, but in creating with the entities inside of you.

Only the writers can change or fix the past by going back to edit old works

Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.

God is a cloud from which rain fell.

Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.

We have conversations with each other most nights - Sylvia Plath and me!

Why do I write? Out of fear. Out of fear that the memory of the people I write about might go lost. Out of fear that the memory of myself might get lost. Or even just to be shielded by a story, to slip inside a story and stop being recognizable, controllable, subject to blackmail.

I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.

May the nights always be aglowwith the bliss of the daywith unharmed hands and feetand kissed cheeks.

Stars are only the rain of the Absolute.

Our desire to say more grows bigger and what to say about it, except that saying is not always about saying, growing is not always about growing.

Knighthood lies above eternity; it doesn’t live off fame, but rather deeds.

You hid in my ink and guided my hand. You stained the pages with your silence as God wrote the words, "Be still." Yet, my heart's blindness could only write in loud hues of red, "I love you.

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

some words bring warmthjust bybeing next to each other.

Life is only a flicker of melted ice.

Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.

Come writers and criticsWho prophesize with your penAnd keep your eyes wideThe chance won't come againAnd don't speak too soonFor the wheel's still in spinAnd there's no tellin' whoThat it's namin'For the loser nowWill be later to winFor the times they are a-changin'.

You are the ocean to my eyes.

Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.

Tell me something only you know and make a new friend.

Most people don't have real friends. You have people in your life waiting for opportunities to see what YOU can do for them.

I'm sick of the images trapped in my headI'm sick of being preoccupied with the dead

I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods.

We are all poets, really.

There is somethingmystically sadand beautifulabouthowi will neversee youagainbut meet youagain and againin poetry.

Before the first before and after the last after, there is night waiting.

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.

By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.

The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire.He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none. A language must be found…of the soul, for the soul and will include everything: perfumes, sounds colors, thought grappling with thought

Your words... I hold them deeplike ancient skinshold wrinkles.