Poets Quotes - Page 2

There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays and every single one of them is right.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body and reduce it to harmony.

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

Although Poets are vain and ambitious, their vanity and ambition are of the purest kind attainable in this world. They are ambitious to be accepted for what they altimately are as revealed in their poetry.

A Blessing on the PoetsPatient earth-digger, impatient fire-maker,Hungry word-taker and roving sound-lover,Sharer and saver, muser and acher,You who are open to hide or uncover,Time-keeper and –hater, wake-sleeper, sleep-waker;May language’s language, the silence that liesUnder each word, move you over and over,Turning you, wondering, back to surprise.

Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat a homesickness or alovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Your head is a lit chamber.

A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer he approaches lucid ground warily like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

I is for immortality, which for some poets is a necessary compensation. Presumably miserable in this life, they will be remembered when the rest of us are long forgotten. None of them asks about the quality of that remembrance--what it will be like to crouch in the dim hallways of somebody's mind until the moment of recollection occurs, or to be lifted off suddenly and forever into the pastures of obscurity. Most poets know better than to concern themselves with such things. They know the chances are better than good that their poems will die when they do and never be heard of again, that they'll be replaced by poems sporting a new look in a language more current. They also know that even if individual poems die, though in some cases slowly, poetry will continue: that its subjects, it constant themes, are less liable to change than fashions in language, and that this is where an alternate, less lustrous immortality might be. We all know that a poem can influence other poems, remain alive in them, just as previous poems are alive in it. Could we not say, therefore, that individual poems succeed most by encouraging revisions of themselves and inducing their own erasure? Yes, but is this immortality, or simply a purposeful way of being dead?

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.

I bargained with Life for a penny,And Life would pay no more, However I begged at eveningWhen I counted my scanty store;For Life is just an employer,He gives you what you ask,But once you have set the wages,Why, you must bear the task.I worked for a menial's hire,Only to learn, dismayed,That any wage I had asked of Life,Life would have paid.

Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.

I am clumsy, drop glasses and get drunk on Monday afternoons. I read Seneca and can recite Shakespeare by heart, but I mess up the laundry, don’t answer my phone and blame the world when something goes wrong. I think I have a dream, but most of the days I’m still sleeping. The grass is cut. It smells like strawberries. Today I finished four books and cleaned my drawers. Do you believe in a God? Can I tell you about Icarus? How he flew too close to the sun?I want to make coming home your favourite part of the day. I want to leave tiny little words lingering in your mind, on nights when you’re far away and can’t sleep. I want to make everything around us beautiful; make small things mean a little more. Make you feel a little more. A little better, a little lighter. The coffee is warm, this cup is yours. I want to be someone you can’t live without.I want to be someone you can’t live without.

With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a lady’s album – and this is always a gallant thing to do, whatever you may say.

How strange and ironic it is- all the words i long to sayare lost in words.

It might seem like the easier way to get rid of a poet would be just to take him out to the backyard, have him kneel between the cans with tomato plants in them and put a bullet in his brain. But they knew from history that it doesn't work to kill a writer. Every time you shoot a poet,a dozen new ones are born. It's like plucking a grey hair.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

i open for you like a flower.i let you in like a new day.

For the way of the comets is the poet's way.

All those big words produce disgust today.

Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives.

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.

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.

Because who hasn't tried to pull their arms from the sleeves of gravity's lead coat?Who doesn't have at least one pair of wax wings out in the garage?

From oriole to crow, note the declineIn music. Crow is realist. But, then,Oriole, also, may be realist.

Colour which is the poet's wealth is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.

I am the poet, you are the poem; I hold the pen, you are the words, love is the ink, silence is the blank page.

Either all lights are turned off or one inner light is missing.

Come writers and criticsWho prophesize with your penAnd keep your eyes wideThe chance won't come againAnd don't speak too soonFor the wheel's still in spinAnd there's no tellin' whoThat it's namin'For the loser nowWill be later to winFor the times they are a-changin'.

We say God and the imagination are one . . .How high that highest candle lights the dark.

How many unuttered words died in the heads of those for whom a word was too expensive.

Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.

she wanted because art

Poetry is not a profession it's a destiny.

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.

A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.

Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.

GIVING - Applied tithing is so rewarding. When you give away your time, talent, and treasures you create a huge shift in your prosperity consciousness. So start where you are as you reach for where it is you want to be.

When a great poet has lived certain things have been done once for all and cannot be achieved again.

Folks say I've never been quite right since - but they only say that because I'm a poet, and because nothing ever worries me. Poets are so rare in Blair Water folks don't understand them, and most people worry so much, they think you're not right if you don't worry.

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind.

The arts that have escaped [uniformity] best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.

The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.

Philosophers, Poets and Fools have similar Consciousness

Deceit dispels the boredom of the Absolute.

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.

Shadow of Your SpiritAt night I see the shadow of your spiritMixing with my blood and soulDuring the day I see your photosThey tell me come to meCome to my world and romanceEven I don’t know by myselfHow I fell into your loveI cannot remove it from my heartYour love stabled my soul

Cosmos is God, who whispered the syllable of life.

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

You mark and celebrate errors, transforming failures into successes.

August is dust here. Droughtstuns the road,but juice gathers in the berries.

Our desire to say more grows bigger and what to say about it, except that saying is not always about saying, growing is not always about growing.

All things want to float.

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

Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager so lucid or dangerous, than a poet.

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

Accidents are not accidents but precise arrivals at the wrong right time.