Poets Quotes

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

Novelists invent characters, poets invent themselves.

~ Marty Rubin

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

God has his poets, they let him dream.

~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

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

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

Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Young poets are too apt to consider themselves “children of the mist” – they must dwell apart from men and contemn their kind, or they fear they shall be only taken for common-place characters. They forget that poetry is the language which speaks to all hearts—and that instead of cherishing the sacred fire as a lonely light, as one that burns in a charnel house, they should bring it forth in its beauty and brightness as a guide to the pleasant places and sparkling waters of earth’s happiness and the radiant messenger of heaven’s exalted hopes. And they should rejoice and be glad that to them the kindling of such high imagination is given. ~ Sarah Josepha Hale Ladies Magazine, November 1830From the Introduction to Cherishing the Sacred Fire

~ Deborah L. Halliday

You don't sound like a scientist; you sound like a poet. Rey smiled. Can I be both? But you'd rather be a poet.Who wouldn't? he said.

~ Daniel Alarcón

Rare-book people have this in common with poets: they too are born, not made.

~ E. Millicent Sowerby

Let’s not be too harsh where poets are concerned. They have to live in no-man’s-land, halfway between dreams and reality.

~ Arthur Gordon

This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.

~ Robert Graves

Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

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.

~ Harley King

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

~ Adrienne Rich

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.

~ Jasper Fforde

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.

~ Dan Simmons

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.

~ Dan Simmons

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.

~ Robert Graves

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.

~ Evelyn Waugh

...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.

~ Orhan Pamuk

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

~ John Keats

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.

~ Dylan Thomas

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

~ Thomas Hardy

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.

~ Mikhail Dudan

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.

~ Gerald Brenan

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