Poets Laureate Quotes

I offer you what I have my
Poverty ~ W.S. Merwin

For such a career I lacked both endurance and inclination:
the stress of ambition left me cold,
while the Muse, the creative spirit, was forever urging on me
that haven of leisure to which I'd always leaned.
The poets of those days I cultivated and cherished:
for me, bards were so many gods. ~ Ovid

We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation. ~ Kenneth Koch

I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality. ~ Mark Strand

What, we may well ask, is there left to live for? Why get out of bed? For this dreary round of amusing insincerity? This filthy bourgeois society that the Aristotelians have foisted upon us? No, we may still choose to live like gods, like poets. Which brings us down to dancing. Yes," he said, turning to Malone, "that is all that's left when love has gone. ~ Andrew Holleran

haiku moment: that moment of absolute intensity when the poet's grasp of his intuition is complete, so that the image lives its own life. Such ~ Kenneth Yasuda

I always thought I was going to be a great poet, and go and live in New York, where the great poets lived - you know, where Whitman had walked the streets. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

It is what the poets of Ireland used to be saying, that every brave man, good at fighting, and every man that could do great deeds and not be making much talk about them, was of the Sons of the Gael; and that every skilled man that had music and that did enchantments secretly, was of the Tuatha de Danaan. ~ Lady Gregory

She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love, as the male novelists defined it, had nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one's petticoat and
But we all know what love is. ~ Virginia Woolf

The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets. ~ W. H. Auden

That being said, some of my favorite poets are extremely funny. The aforementioned Matt Rohrer, for instance. Mary Ruefle. James Tate might be the best example of someone who is systematically misread because he can be hilarious. In his poems, as in all great funny poems, the humor is one very appealing version of the surprise and associative movement that is at the heart of all poetry. ~ Matthew Zapruder

Behold yon rough and flinty road
Where youth, now youth no more,
Gropes whining, seeking crumbs of loaves
He cast away of yore. ~ Emma Ghent Curtis

I want so badly to help you realize, Elizabeth Anne, how difficult and puzzling and full of wonder it all is: some day I will tell you how I learned to watch the shifting light of autumn days or smelled the earth through snow in March; how one winter morning God vanished from my life and how one summer evening I sat in a Ferris wheel, looking down on a man that hurt me badly; I will tell you how I once travelled to Rome and saw all the soldiers in that city of dead poets; I will tell you how I met your father outside a movie house in Toronto, and how you came to be. Perhaps that is where I will begin. On a winter afternoon when we turn the lights on early, or perhaps a summer day of leaves and sky, I will begin by conjugating the elemental verb. I am. You are. It is. ~ Richard B. Wright

Faith is a question of eyesight; even the blind can see that. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die. ~ Sharon Olds

You are the beautiful half
of a golden hurt. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

I cannot understand why the poets of our day wax indignant at the vulgarity of their age and complain of having come into the world too early or too late. I believe that every man of intellect can create his own beautiful fable of life. ~ Gabriele D'Annunzio

Irish improves a poet. ~ Sina Queyras

The universe is God's son. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

His Highness was always confident in his statements, especially about what he viewed for the first time. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the blue green shoots and the plant called "audacity", which poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out everything that was said ... I will do anything to escape boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough. ~ Anne Carson

Walking companions, like heroes, are difficult to pluck out of the crowd of acquaintances. Good dispositions, ready wit, friendly conversation serve well enough by the fireside but they prove insufficient in the field. For there you need transcendentalists-nothing less; you need poets, sages, humorists and natural philosophers. ~ Brooks Atkinson

I have sought love because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven the saints and poets have imagined. ~ Bertrand Russell

A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem. ~ Douglas Dunn

The ship did not respond to queries. Without the ship, there could be no fatline relay to the Ousters, the Web, or anywhere else beyond Hyperion. Normal comm bands were down. 'Could the ship have been destroyed?' Sol asked the Consul. 'No. The message is being received, just not responded to. Gladstone still has the ship in quarantine.' Sol squinted out over the barrens to where the mountains shimmered in the heat haze. Several klicks closer, the ruins of the City of Poets rose jaggedly against the skyline. 'Just as well,' he said. 'We have one deus ex machina too many as it is.' Paul ~ Dan Simmons

In other words, if Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy showed more than their fair share of pathology it was due less to the requirements of their creative work than to the personal sufferings caused by the unhealthy conditions of a Russian society nearing collapse. If so many American poets and playwrights committed suicide or ended up addicted to drugs and alcohol it was not their creativity that did it but an artistic scene that promised much, gave few rewards and left nine out of ten artists neglected if not ignored. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Poets and men of action differ: the former yield to their feelings in order to reproduce them in lively colors, and therefore judge only ex post facto; the latter feel and judge at one and the same time. ~ Honore De Balzac

Truth like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold screenwriter of Dead Poets' Society. ~ Tom Schulman

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

A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published. ~ Jim Jarmusch

Forget decorated generals, tell me about Private Ryan. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

SOME YEARS, like some poets,and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

No words can express how much the world owes to sorrow. Most of the Psalms were born in the wilderness. Most of the Epistles were written in a prison. The greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers have all passed through fire. The greatest poets have "learned in suffering what they taught in song." In bonds Bunyan lived the allegory that he afterwards wrote, and we may thank Bedford Jail for the Pilgrim's Progress. Take comfort, afflicted Christian! When God is about to make pre-eminent use of a person, He put them in the fire. ~ George MacDonald

Few poets better convey the uneasy transition from Victorianism to Modernism than Thomas Hardy. His novels, written between 1870 and 1895, made him not only the recorder of his distinctive region of 'Wessex', but the explorer of the transition of lives and minds from the age of traditional values and religious certainties to the age of godlessness and modern tragedy, a transition sometimes described as 'the clash of the modern'. ~ Ronald Carter

Now that we are all so smart, we don't easily find resolutions. ~ Dejan Stojanovic