Poets Quotes

I had no more alphabetthan the journeying of the swallows,the pure and tiny waterof the small, fiery birdthat dances rising from the pollen.

~ Pablo Neruda

Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.

~ William Stafford

Between roars the lion purrs.

~ William Stafford

All good poems are victories over something.

~ Stephen Dunn

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

~ Wallace Stevens

One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.

~ Robert Hass

Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.

~ Robert Hass

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

~ Virginia Woolf

Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Because who hasn't tried to pull their arms from the sleeves of gravity's lead coat?Who doesn't have at least one pair of wax wings out in the garage?

~ Lucia Perillo

With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a lady’s album – and this is always a gallant thing to do, whatever you may say.

~ Gustave Flaubert

We say God and the imagination are one . . .How high that highest candle lights the dark.

~ Wallace Stevens

Poetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

~ Wallace Stevens

I’m a maker of ballads right prettyI write them right here in the streetYou can buy them all over the cityyours for a penny a sheetI’m a word pecker out of the printersout of the dens of Gin LaneI’ll write up a scene on a counter- confessions and sins in the main, boysconfessions and sins in the mainThen you’ll find me in Madame Geneva’skeeping the demons at bayThere’s nothing like gin for drowning them inbut they’ll always be back on a hanging day, on a hanging dayThey come rattling over the cobblesthey sit on their coffins of blackSome are struck dumb, some gabbletop-heavy on brandy or sackThe pews are all full of fine fellowsand the hawker has set up her shopAs they’re turning them off at the gallowsshe’ll be selling right under the drop, boysselling right under the dropThen you’ll find me in Madame Geneva’skeeping the demons at bayThere’s nothing like gin for drowning them inbut they’ll always be back on a hanging day, on a hanging day

~ Mark Knopfler

Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.

~ Helen Vendler

Poets make the best topographers.

~ W.g. Hoskins

. . . Orpheus struck dumb with hindsight.

~ A.e. Stallings

Evening came, a paw, to the gray hut by the river.

~ William Stafford

The bats inebriate the sky . . .

~ A.e. Stallings

A single wire hanger on a nail by itselfIsn't bad though a stack of them on a floorIs too gloomy for words.

~ Dara Weir

. . . a racer snake / slicking off / like a signature into the weeds.

~ Tony Crunk

A poet is someone who never forgets they were born naked.

~ Marty Rubin

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.

~ Nicholson Baker

It may be enough, however, to have it said that we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets (include preachers, musicians, and blues singers).

~ Maya Angelou

A versifier arranges sounds, a poet arranges meaning in the sounds.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives.

~ Thomas Hardy

All we’re trying to do is word the world. Detail is one way we do that. We enumerate, notate, name the things seen.

~ Eamon Grennan

He thinks my hair smells like spring rain. I'm really trying to remain stoic and unaffected. I remind myself that I don't like poetic language. I don't like poetry. I don't even like people who like poetry.But I'm not dead inside either.

~ Nicola Yoon

We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.

~ William Carlos Williams

A poet is a feeling, sentient being, not a word machine.

~ Marty Rubin

Men of dreams, the lovers and the poets, are better in most things than the men of my sort; the men of intellect. You take your being from your mothers. You live to the full: it is given you to love with your whole strength, to know and taste the whole of life. We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full reality. Ours is a thin and arid life, but the fullness of being is yours; yours the sap of the fruit, the garden of lovers, the joyous pleasaunces of beauty. Your home is the earth, ours the idea of it. Your danger is to be drowned in the world of sense, ours to gasp for breath in airless space. You are a poet, I a thinker. You sleep on your mother's breast, I watch in the wilderness. On me there shines the sun; on you the moon with all the stars. Your dreams are all of girls, mine of boys—

~ Hermann Hesse

Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.

~ Saul Bellow

It might seem like the easier way to get rid of a poet would be just to take him out to the backyard, have him kneel between the cans with tomato plants in them and put a bullet in his brain. But they knew from history that it doesn't work to kill a writer. Every time you shoot a poet,a dozen new ones are born. It's like plucking a grey hair.

~ Heather O'neill

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.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read the.

~ Henry David Thoreau

As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that linedoes me no good, because, as I’ve already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

That is why they have poets—to classify all the degrees of love. It is for scientists to classify the maladies arising from the want of it.

~ Sarah Ruhl

The eclipses ofpoets are not foretold in the calender.

~ Marina Tsvetaeva

On a small table beside his chair were other haphazardly stacked volumes by such poets as Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, a dangerous crew to let into your head.

~ Dean Koontz

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