Poetry Poet Quotes

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry. ~ Edward Hirsch

The true poet dreams being awake. ~ Charles Lamb

Look ahead to the bright light
Use your hopes to unfold each night
Rejoice in the struggle, stay sane
There's always sunshine after rain ~ Soulla Christodoulou

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

This is the part of anguish grey curtains blue & wallpapers yellow. This is the part where I learn to lose you & try to gain me back. This is a part where the end is my start! ~ Sijdah Hussain

I'm burning in despair
Love which you distanced from me
Return once again
I'll forgive you again
Return, Page 19 ~ Delicious David

Poets arent very usefulBecause they aren't consumeful or produceful.. ~ Ogden Nash

I am not a painter. I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not. ~ Frank O'Hara

I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary. ~ Adrienne Rich

How do you define a poet? It's very simple. Anyone declaring that he is a poet, is a poet. ~ Billy Cannon

The poet uses the results of science and philosophy, and generalizes their widest deductions. ~ Henry David Thoreau

You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket. ~ John Adams

God is the perfect poet. ~ Robert Browning

Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events. ~ John Drinkwater

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
~ Jean Cocteau

Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances. ~ C.D. Wright

We are all of us Apollos serving some Admetus. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Autumn
The passion
Is still flourishing in the branches
Yellow funny and daring red
The sun warms even in the days
Where the fog
Stubbornly in the morning
From a distance
A woodpecker knocks
Impermanence
Is the enemy of beauty ~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

A poet must be a professor of the five senses and must open doors among them. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

As long as there is satire, the poet is, as it were, particeps criminis. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them. ~ Paul Auster

In The End The Words Are The All And The Nothing. ~ R.M. Engelhardt

I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry. ~ Edward Hirsch

Who, except the poets, reads poetry? ~ Babette Deutsch

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet. ~ Misha Collins

Going down in history is a dead end pursuit ~ Benny Bellamacina

The poet is blithe and cheery ever, and as well as nature. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time. ~ Virginia Woolf

The manifestation of poetry in external life is formal perfection. True sentiment grows within, and art must represent internal phenomena externally. ~ Franz Grillparzer

A tattered copy of Johnson's large Dictionary was a great delight to me, on account of the specimens of English versifications which I found in the Introduction. I learned them as if they were so many poems. I used to keep this old volume close to my pillow; and I amused myself when I awoke in the morning by reciting its jingling contrasts of iambic and trochaic and dactylic metre, and thinking what a charming occupation it must be to "make up" verses. ~ Lucy Larcom

A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer. ~ Jack Spicer

And all poets love dust and mist because all the last answers. Go running back to dust and mist. ~ Carl Sandburg

i have no mind/just a series of clicks ~ Raegan Butcher

There were poets before Homer. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

A poet cannot be a Party member ... without paying the price. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Songs of myself
I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate
into new tongue.
I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,.. ~ Walt Whitman

All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, 'Something's wrong, let's change it for the better.' ~ Sonia Sanchez

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

A Writer in Love.

I was just a word weaver
What did I know of love?

Only that
Some days when the words weren't enough,
I knew
I was in love. ~ Saiber

Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

[I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet. ~ Dylan Thomas

And here I am on my borrowed time. ~ Piyush Rohankar

Poetry is evidently a contagious complaint. ~ Washington Irving

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level. ~ Rick Fox

The founding father of Albanian literature is the nineteenth-century writer Naim Frasheri. Without having the greatness of Dante or Shakespeare, he is nonetheless the founder, the emblematic character. He wrote long epic poems, as well as lyrical poetry, to awaken the national consciousness of Albania. ~ Ismail Kadare

On the far horizon waved some flicker of light
My heart, a city of suffering, awoke in a state of dream
My eyes, turning restless, still dreaming,
the morning, dawning in this vacuous abode of separation. ~ Faiz Ahmad Faiz

I'm a fiction writer, and I do write essays, but I am not a poet. And I absolutely reject the phrase 'woman writer' as anti-feminist. I wrote an essay about this as far back as 1977, at the height of the neo-feminist movement. ~ Cynthia Ozick

Anger is easier than forgiveness. ~ Ellen Hopkins

It's good to be with someone
who has been through hell -
life is hard,
and strange,
and a lot of shit happens.
And when someone's been through the
worst of it already,
pain doesn't come as much of a surprise,
they just
sit down
tie their shoelaces
wave to old demons,
and get on with it. ~ Atticus Poetry

Leaving the day to itself, you close the door behind you and pour a bowl of cereal, then another, and would a third if you didn't interrupt yourself with the statement - you aren't hungry.
Appetite won't attach you to anything no matter how depleted you feel. ~ Claudia Rankine

Obviously people's feelings are going to get hurt when you use certain words, but you can't outlaw words. They're really the history of our culture. They tell you what's going on. When you make words politically incorrect you're taking all the poetry out of the language. I'm pro anybody living their lives the way they want to live, sexually and otherwise; and I'm anti any kind of language repression. ~ David Duchovny

...what has made it possible for us to remain ourselves in spite of so many wars, invasions and occupations, is our spiritual, not our material, strength--our poetry, and not out technology; our religion, and not our factories. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski

Horse

What does the horse give you
That I cannot give you?

I watch you when you are alone,
When you ride into the field behind the dairy,
Your hands buried in the mare's
Dark mane.

Then I know what lies behind your silence:
Scorn, hatred of me, of marriage. Still,
You want me to touch you; you cry out
As brides cry, but when I look at you I see
There are no children in your body.
Then what is there?

Nothing, I think. Only haste
To die before I die.

In a dream, I watched you ride the horse
Over the dry fields and then
Dismount: you two walked together;
In the dark, you had no shadows.
But I felt them coming toward me
Since at night they go anywhere,
They are their own masters.

Look at me. You think I don't understand?
What is the animal
If not passage out of this life? ~ Louise Gluck

To discover the source of this alchemical love within is to uncover the deepest secrets of the soul. It is to unearth and align with the ultimate truth of who we are. ~ Atalina Wright

We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. ~ John Steinbeck

The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors. ~ Thomas B. Macaulay

While some mothers sing lullabies to their children, my mother read me poetry. And to this day, I associate my strongest and most insistent feelings with words lyrically organized on a page. ~ Masiela Lusha

My love for Neo-Tokyo is a bulbous mass
of post-human organic circuitry.
Cyperpunk is my mother tongue.
My love is a man-machine interface gun. ~ Yann Rousselot

As for poetry 'belonging' in the classroom, it's like the way they taught us sex in those old hygiene classes: not performance but semiotics. If it I had taken Hygiene 71 seriously, I would have become a monk; & if I had taken college English seriously, I would have become an accountant. ~ Jerome Rothenberg

In the silence of consciousness I asked myself:
why did I reject my life? And I answer
Die Erde überwältigt mich:
the earth defeats me. ~ Louise Gluck

…Let all lights but yours be nothing to me.
Let the memory of tongues not unnerve me so that I stumble or quake.
But lead me at times beside the still waters;
There when I crouch to drink let me catch a glimpse of your image
Before it is obscured with my own… ~ W.S. Merwin

A poet trains himself to stand out in a storm and be struck by lightning. If he is lucky enough to be struck six times, he becomes immortal. Randall Jarrell said it and he's right. ~ James Dickey

Release-
For years
they told you to
sit.
Stay.

Now they open the door
and tell you to
get up.
Leave.

Where do you go
with no one
to show you
the way? ~ Keelie Breanna

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

Like dreams and works of art, fantasies are far more than what they appear to be on the surface. They're complex psychic creations whose symbolic content mustn't be translated into literal intent. Think poetry, not prose, ~ Esther Perel

My hair smells of oceanic wind
My eyes are two starfish
The charming, turquoise sea
is seducing me
The rhythms of the calming
Crashing waves are my guide
Omnipotent, almost holy,
They seek to cleanse my polluted soul
Here, by the seductive sea,
I am unshackled. I am free.
I am me. ~ Melody Lee

This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man's-land, and the holiday-maker claims the valleys for his own. But this busyness is but of yesterday, and not ten years ago the fields lay quiet to the gaze of placid beasts and the wandering stars. This story I have culled from the grave of an old fashion, and set down for the love of a great soul and the poetry of life. ~ John Buchan

Perfumes are the feelings of flowers. ~ Heinrich Heine

Rusted Flowers

From her heart's
tear-salted soil,
rusted flowers grew.
A serrated beauty;
wounding all those
who bent near. ~ John Mark Green

In the dark I rest,
unready for the light which dawns
day after day,
eager to be shared.
Black silk, shelter me.
I need
more of the night before I open
eyes and heart
to illumination. I must still
grow in the dark like a root
not ready, not ready at all. ~ Denise Levertov

I can't let anything be her fault, even if it was.
Especially if it was. ~ Blythe Baird

Imagine a sunset, lavender and red / as battered morals ... ~ Sarah Gorham

The sensual and spiritual are the same energy playing at different speeds, like poetry and dance" Alla Bozarth Campbell. ~ Alla Bozarth-Campbell

I sometimes go months without remembering you.
Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space. ~ Laure-Anne Bosselaar

There is not enough time in life to worry about there being enough time in life. ~ Atticus Poetry

Sometimes it is good and sometimes
it is dangerous like the ignorance
of particulars, but our words are clear
and our movements give off light. ~ Robert Hass