Poetry By Poets Quotes

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. ~ Salman Rushdie

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. ~ Emily Dickinson

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these. ~ T. S. Eliot

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. So medicine, law, business, engineering... these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love... these are what we stay alive for. ~ Walt Whitman

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness. ~ Christopher Morley

By(e) pen, I've tried my hand at poetry; only to see how boring it is to me. That is, unless I get a chance to destroy each and every piece while doing it as I please. ~ Criss Jami

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there. ~ Henry Miller

Don't think for second you are not a badass warrior. That's precisely your problem, you don't realize how amazingly brilliant and super kickass you are. Your potential is only limited by your mind. ~ Melody Lee

the hope is small
but it is everything. ~ AVA.

If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream-a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows-is essentially poetry. ~ Michel Leiris

As you reveal inch by inch, Of what God took seven days to make, And I shall forfeit the seven heavens, To possess what lays beneath your beautiful breast, And lay to rest in those jade green eyes, With your heart inside mine ~ Piyush Rohankar

No one can threaten poetry. It's always been there, always will be. Humans need it to live: it has sustaining powers. How could we (anyone) get through adolescence without some form of song? Song is only a version of lyric poetry that is carried more by melody than by internal coherence and unity. but lyric and song - they are the same. ~ Gregory Orr

We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us. Hence … in poetry … trees, mountains, and streams are personified, and the inanimate parts of nature acquire sentiment and passion. ~ David Livingstone Smith

THE KEY TO A WONDERFUL LIFE

The key to a wonderful life
Is to never stop wandering into wonder.
Because to live a predictable life,
Only fills a person with strife,
And such a person will always be wondering:
'What a limitless life could be lived beyond the lines?'
Such is a question a curious spirit would never sit and ponder.
So always pursue new ventures in your life,
And be willing to open doors to different light;
This is the only way to keep it magical and always filled with wonder.
Days will feel shorter, but your happiness will grow stronger --
Because living a life without curiosity and adventure,
Is a stale life where days only feel longer and
Longer.

Poetry by Suzy Kassem ~ Suzy Kassem

The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet's eyes. ~ Vera Brittain

As to animals," said the Count unexpectedly, "whatever one says, I maintain that the rodent family has a certain charm about it."
"The rodent family ... ?" replied the Baron, not getting the drift at all.
"Rabbits, marmots, squirrels, and the like."
"You have pets of that sort, sir?"
"No, sir, not at all. Too much of an odor. It would be all over the house."
"Ah, I see. Very charming, but you wouldn't have them in the house, is that it?"
"Well, sir, in the first place, they seem to have been ignored by the poets, d'you see. And what has no place in a poem has no place in my house. That's my family rule."
"I see."
"No, I don't keep them as pets. But they're such fuzzy, timid little creatures that I can't help thinking there's no more charming animal."
"Yes, Count, I quite agree."
"Actually, sir, every charming creature, no matter what sort, seems to have a strong odor."
"Yes, indeed, sir. I believe one might say so. ~ Yukio Mishima

The world is a navy in an empty ocean. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

No doubt, the poetry, overjoyed by swallowing the beverage of passionate thoughts, delights the mind. But she does not realize the sorrows and troubles of the poor. Forget depicting the beauty of passions and present your poetry as a necklace of thought gems to swell the soul. ~ Manmohan Acharya

You cannot look into a cradle and read the secret message traced by a divine hand and wrapped up in that bit of clay, and more than you can see the North Star in the magnetic needle. God has loaded the needle of that young life so it will point to the star which presides over poetry, art, law, medicine, or whatever your own pet calling is, until you have wasted years precious life, yet, when once free, the needle flies back to its own star. ~ Orison Swett Marden

The true history of the world must always be the history of the few; and as we measure the Himalaya by the height of Mount Everest, we must take the true measure of India from the poets of the Veda, the sages of the Upanishads, the founders of the Vedanta and Sankhya philosophies, and the authors of the oldest law-books, and not from the millions who are born and die in their villages, and who have never for one moment been roused out of their drowsy dream of life. ~ Friedrich Max Muller

Eager to see the colours of life
The darkness giving away to light
I set my soul ablaze
By books at candlelight
And my heart on fire
By decisions under sunlight. ~ Tania Ferguson

v. It would be very odd if two poets were killed in the same way...

May on Lake Asquam, by Jean Giraudoux ~ Jean Giraudoux

Those who hate rain hate life. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

AS their peculiar perfume is the chief association with spices, so sorcery is allied in every memory to gypsies. And as it has not escaped many poets that there is something more strangely sweet and mysterious in the scent of cloves than in that of flowers, so the attribute of inherited magic power adds to the romance of these picturesque wanderers. Both the spices and the Romany come from the far East - the fatherland of divination and enchantment. The latter have been traced with tolerable accuracy, If we admit their affinity with the Indian Dom and Domar, back to the p. 2 threshold of history, or well-nigh into prehistoric times, and in all ages they, or their women, have been engaged, as if by elvish instinct, in selling enchant. merits, peddling prophecies and palmistry, and dealing with the devil generally ill a small retail way. As it was of old so it is to-day - Ki shan i Romani - Adoi san' i chov'hani. Wherever gypsies go, There the witches are, we know. ~ Charles Godfrey Leland

For each of us is
A separate miracle
In a collective miracle

Brought together
For a moment
By a group of notes
And a scan of words

From the heart
Of one
Who dares
To think

That others
Might feel
As he feels ~ Leonard Nimoy

For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. ~ Adrienne Rich

A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices. ~ Alasdair Gray

But as men grow more industrialised and regimented, the kind of delight that is common in children becomes impossible to adults because they are always thinking of the next thing and cannot let themselves be absorbed in the moment. This habit of thinking of the 'next thing' is more fatal to any kind of aesthetic excellence than any other habit of mind that can be imagined, and if art, in any important sense, is to survive it will not be by the foundation of solemn academies, but by recapturing the capacity for wholehearted joys and sorrows which prudence and foresight have all but destroyed. ~ Bertrand Russell

The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied. ~ Sigmund Freud

What can I do with these people? They come to the risk so dutifully. Are delighted by anecdotes that give them Poetry. Are grateful to be told of diagonals that give them Painting. Good people. But stubborn when warned the beast is not domestic. How can I persuade them that the dark, soulful Keats was five feet one? Liked fighting and bear-baiting? I can't explain the red hair. Nor say how you died so full of lust for Fanny Brawne. I will tell them of Semele. ~ Jack Gilbert

I was reading Emily Dickinson and Edwin Arlington Robinson, but these weren't the poets that influenced me. I think Gwendolyn Brooks influenced me because she wrote about Chicago, and she wrote about poor people. And she influenced me in my life by giving me a blurb. I would see her in action, and she listened to every single person. She didn't say, "Oh, I'm tired. I gotta go." She was there, and present, with every single person. She's one of the great teachers. ~ Sandra Cisneros

But there exist other, different, methods of infolding-obliquity, compression, and the Seven Types of Ambiguity-a modest estimate of Empson's. The later Joyce, for instance, makes one realize why the German word for writing poetry is 'dichten'- to condense (certainly more poetical than 'composing', i.e. 'putting together'; but perhaps less poetical than the Hungarian kolteni-to hatch). Freud actually believed that to condense or compress several meanings or allusions into a word or phrase was the essence of poetry. It is certainly an essential ingredient with Joyce; almost every word in the great monologues in Finnegans Wake is overcharged with allusions and implications. To revert to an earlier metaphor, economy demands that the stepping stones of the narrative should be spaced wide enough apart to require a significant effort from the reader; Joyce makes him feel like a runner in a marathon race with hurdles every other step and aggravated by a mile-long row of hieroglyphs which he must decipher. Joyce would perhaps be the perfect writer-of the perfect reader existed. ~ Arthur Koestler

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting
the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near. ~ Saul Bellow

To hide feelings when you are near crying is the secret of dignity. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

He spoke in english. Not flawlessly by any means. Not like a Nazi POW camp commandant who appreciates english poetry and says things like 'you know, we are much alike, you and I I'. But good enough ~ Alex Garland

And I know few would believe me but belief is what drives a man,
If all of us long for the Golden Age, then we all can,
Bring the days filled with peace, prosperity, generosity, love and fearless nigh',
We all must believe something to survive, I believe in the serene age lost in seasons gone by. ~ Adhish Mazumder

Our lives are written by the divine hands of Him we are merely actors destined to complete the roles in the cosmic play. All that would make difference would be how well will you act! ~ Preeth Nambiar