Poets Quotes

depth and substance.the two most exquisite qualities. be it in a poemor a person.

~ Sanober Khan

When there's a moon the shadows in the house grow larger;invisible hands draw back the curtains,a pallid finger writes forgotten words on dustof the piano...

~ Yiannis Ritsos

Again I resume the longlesson: how small a thingcan be pleasing, how littlein this hard world it takesto satisfy the mindand bring it to its rest.

~ Wendell Berry

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

~ William H. Gass

A pear should come to the table popped with juice,Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On termsLike these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.

~ Wallace Stevens

At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.

~ Aberjhani

The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.

~ André Breton

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.

~ Gustave Flaubert

We must listen to poets.

~ Gaston Bachelard

a silent night. - the most eloquent poem i have ever read.

~ Sanober Khan

One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.

~ Helen Vendler

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.

~ A.e. Housman

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.

~ Annie Finch

your smile.is the ultimategolden dream.all the poemsin the worldare waking up from.

~ Sanober Khan

no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.

~ W.h. Auden

A poem is a meteor.

~ Wallace Stevens

I believe in being a poet in all moments of life. Being a poet means being human. I know some poets whose daily behavior has nothing to do with their poetry. In other words, they are only poets when they write poetry. Then it is finished and they turn into greedy, indulgent, oppressive, shortsighted, miserable, and envious people. Well, I cannot believe their poems

~ فروغ فرخزاد

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

~ Robert Hass

This dream the world is having about itselfincludes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,a groove in the grass my father showed us allone day while meadowlarks were trying to tellsomething better about to happen.

~ William Stafford

It is ferocious, life, but it must eat . . .

~ Lucia Perillo

There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either

~ Robert Graves

… the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder.

~ Yiannis Ritsos

Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem’s power is as an instrument of possession but at the same time, ineffably, it expresses the desire for possession, like a net that fishes by itself, a hook that is also the desire of the fish. To be a poet is to desire and, at the same time, to obtain, in the exact shape of the desire.

~ Julio Cortázar

I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred million men march in step in a parody of order.

~ Julio Cortázar

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.

~ Karen Tei Yamashita

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret suffrings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. People corwd around the poet and say to him: Sing for us soon again; that is as much to say, May new sufferings torment your soul.

~ Søren Kierkegaard

The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer the intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years.

~ Aberjhani

A true poet is one who can appreciate the disciplines and structures of any and all styles of poetry.

~ David J. Delaney

I recall that now and I recall everything for what do we have but the past to parent us?

~ Kathleen Driskell

the next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.

~ Annie Finch

. . .criticism is to poetry as air is to a noise: it allows it to be heard; and even if we can't see it or feel it, it is there, shaping how we hear.

~ Annie Finch

. . . poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.

~ Major Jackson

I never have time to write anymore. And when I do I only write about how I never have time. It's work and it's money and I've written more lists than songs lately. I stay up all night to do all these things I need to do, be all these things I want to be, playing with shadows in the darkness that shouldn't be able to exist. Empty bottles and cigarettes while watching the sunrise, why do I complain? I have it all, everything I ever asked for.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

A versifier passes through the sound, sounds go through a poet.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

The Throes of Poetry - Hymns formed from groans of acquaintance, its rhythm weaving between tranquility, compassions, and peril - like bare feet stomping on broken glass - bleeds, recoils, then steps again.

~ Traci Lea Larussa

Love doesn’t make you a poet, it makes you poetry.

~ Yarro Rai

poetrymelts my bones.enters my blood.and changesits composition.

~ Sanober Khan

Be a poet in action as well as in words.

~ Marty Rubin

We are all poets, really.

~ Walter Lowenfels

Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.

~ Katerina Stoykova Klemer