Poet Quotes

In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder, when the healing grace ...

Question not, but live and labourTill yon goal be won,Helping every feeble neighbour,Seeking help fr...

The pity is not that there is a myth of Sylvia Plath but that the myth is not simply that of an enor...

The so-called poet with his vague dreams and ideals is indeed no better than a harmless lunatic; the...

Music resembles poetry, in eachAre nameless graces which no methods teach,And which a master hand al...

Inscriptions here of various Names I view'd,The greater part by hostile time subdu'd;Yet wide was sp...

Through the ingenuousness of her age beamed an ardent mind, a mind not of the women but of the poet;...

Villon our sad bad glad mad brother's name.

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!

If I had a soul I sold itfor pretty wordsIf I had a body I usedit up spurting my essenceAllen Ginsbe...

Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediat...

And she tried the high heels but she couldn't bring herself to prance.

There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the o...

I will not stop singingthe Muses who set me dancing.

The here, the now and the individual have always been the special concern of the saint, the artist, ...

Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It ...

In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he...

Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fi...

The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space in time. The present is ...

All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female...

I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people eve...

A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any s...

Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ th...

And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black r...

Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving th...

I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment....

You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up energy, and give off oxy...

Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancie...

I was in no tent under leaves, sleepless and glad. There was no moon at all; along the world’s coast...

It looked as though the leaves of the autumn forest had taken flight, and were pouring down the vall...

Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. T...

Were the earth as smooth as a ball bearing, it might be beautiful seen from another planet, as the r...

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. The surface of mystery is not smooth, any mor...

I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table fro...

If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," I...

And here face down beneath the sunAnd here upon earth's noonward heightTo feel the always coming onT...

The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses

Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.

Lovers, Lunatics and poets are made of same stuff.

I think it’s vital. It’s odd to me because many people say we live in these awful times and we need ...

A poem is a naked person....Some people say that I am a poet.

The poet gives his whole life such a voluntarily steep incline that it is impossible for it to exist...

To see things as the poet sees them I must share his consciousness and not attend to it; I must look...

The mainspring of genius is curiosity.

How are his poems?""He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.

I wait on my fix:I am a poetry junkie.

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?

For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eter...

Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician....

Morning and eveningMaids heard the goblins cry:'Come buy our orchard fruits,Come buy, come buy

He wouldn't perform without a recording now, she was certain, like a poet working in the oral tradit...

City of Vassillian a party of five sage princes with four horses. The princes, who are of course bra...

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about the planet of Golgafrincham: it is a plan...

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove ...

You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It’s only that.

How—I didn't know anyword for it—how "unlikely". . .How had I come to be here,like them, and overhea...

One has to commit a painting,' said Degas,'the way one commits a crime.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!O falling fire and piercing cryand panic, and a weak mailed fistclench...

We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble.

The Poets light but Lamps-Themselves-go out-

Don't ask me any questions. I've seen how things that seek their way find their void instead.

The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.

Philosophy is to the mind of the architect as eyesight to his steps. The Term 'genius' when applied ...

Perhaps he even needs to have been a critic and a sceptic and a dogmatist and an historian, and in a...

Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had bee...

As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the Neolithic: the fertility of t...

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quic...

That's a poet.''I thought you said it was a bo-at.''Stupid pet! Don't you know what a poet it?''Why,...

Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet.

No man was ever yet a great poet without at the same time being a profound philosopher.

Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.

All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them but what is un...

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribe...

And while he compared all these things which he was seeing with his eyes to the mental pictures he h...

Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cu...

The man is either mad or he is making verses.

Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?

...Cody is furiously explaining to his little son Tim 'Never let the right hand know what your left ...

I go out on the side of a hill, maybe hunting deer, and sit there and see the shadow of night coming...

Whose starboard eyeSaw chariot 'swing low'?

I think Wordsworth was as surprised to see me as I was him. It can't be usual to go to your favorite...

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.

The first inkling of this notion had come to him the Christmas before, at his daughter's place in Ve...

These are all direct quotes, except every time they use a curse word, I'm going to use the name of a...

Think of my Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world - there I am a child -...

Life. This morning the sun made me adore it. It had, behind the dripping pine trees, the oriental br...

In our society of fixed texts and printed words, it is the function of the poet to see the life valu...

It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matter...

It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician...

Good morning, daddy!Ain't you heardThe boogie-woogie rumbleOf a dream deferred?Listen closely:You'll...

Careful there, Poet. I might start to believe you.

If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.

TO VICTOR HUGO OF MY CROW PLUTO “Even when the bird is walking we know that it has wings.”—VICTOR HU...

In the days of Prismatic Colornot in the days of Adam and Eve, but when Adam was alone; when there w...

TO A GIRAFFE If it is unpermissible, in fact fatal to be personal and undesirable to be literal—detr...

ROSEMARY Beauty and Beauty’s son and rosemary— Venus and Love, her son, to speak plainly— born of th...

I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participa...

For rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire, Show'd me the hig...