Poets Quotes - Page 7

For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

How alive is thought, invisible, yet without thought there is no sight.

Some writers write to forget. Some forget to write.

Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.

Stars ink your fingerswith a lexicon of flameblazing rare knowledge.

Poetry was not meant to be a workhorse; it was not designed to paint pretty moral pictures of life; it was not brought into being to confuse us with cryptograms, or high platitudes, or pompous pretensions. The poet was meant to be a seer; he was designed to run toward the intensities and magnificences of life, to bathe his hands in reality. But where the mystic ran toward Reality in silence and lost himself in it, the poet as soon as he had experienced it, ran back toward humanity crying the good news and putting it into shimmering webs of words.

i am awake and aliveand swollen and heavywith love.

Real geniuses would like that what we think of ourselves is true.

The Throes of Poetry - Hymns formed from groans of acquaintance, its rhythm weaving between tranquility, compassions, and peril - like bare feet stomping on broken glass - bleeds, recoils, then steps again.

You touched my heart...ever so softlyand I realizedtears had never been...merely saltand the rainOh the Rain!had never been merely water.

funny how our heartswere designed to loveso fiercely.but break ever so gently.

Poetry makes nothing happen.

To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light.

The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.

If I began to drawmyself away from youwe’d still be liketwo mixed colors of paintimpossible to separate.

There can be no forced inspiration.

Two forces create eternity – a fairy tale and a dream from the fairy tale.

After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare?

You don’t know anything, but I know even less.

i wanted to destroy you.you are mine to ruin.something so beautifulshould only exist for me.

They blossomed, they did not talk about blossoming.

...when a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was...this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.

a single poemthe thing that can keep melight on my feet,when my soul isheavy with sorrow.

Be a poet in action as well as in words.

Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.

Names sound nice because no one peeks behind the cover to see the sad face of a poem crying for meaning, while the name of the creator proudly smiles from the title.

He would write and write. He would make wonderful things happen. Some of it would be true. All of it would be true. Most of it would be true.

Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem’s power is as an instrument of possession but at the same time, ineffably, it expresses the desire for possession, like a net that fishes by itself, a hook that is also the desire of the fish. To be a poet is to desire and, at the same time, to obtain, in the exact shape of the desire.

The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.

Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved the Inquisition might have let him alone.

Did you know that Bharatiyar used the pen name “Shelley-dasan”? He admired the poems of Shelley so deeply that he wrote under the name “Shelley’s servant”. Wasn’t that a wonderful gesture of humility by someonewho was such a great poet himself? And later, Bharatiyar had his own dasan, the poet Subburathinam, who tookthe pen name Bharathidasan. Subburathinam’s poetry inspired yet another poet who wrote as Surada, short for Subburathina-dasan. And to think this long chain of inspiration spans centuries, going back to the poets who inspired Wordsworth, who inspired Shelley, who inspired our own Bharati.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skilfully.

Loveis not leaning on each other, adjusting to fit a different size.Loveis simply two hands reached out in the darkness,saying; I’ll be your light, if you’ll be mine.

In poetry you must love the words the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

The life we’re given is on a thread, so wear it well.

Poetry is Life. We experience poetry from the time we awake each morning and inhale that fresh breath of air. You are living poetry. Poetry is not defined by the laws of man. Inspiration is the key.

Teaching others, he corrected himself.

some words bring warmthjust bybeing next to each other.

A single poemis worth a hundredcozy winter nightskind wordsand healed wounds.

God is busy and has no time for you.

Life is only a flicker of melted ice.

Behold yon rough and flinty roadWhere youth, now youth no more,Gropes whining, seeking crumbs of loavesHe cast away of yore.

Poets and children," said Sylvan. "We are the same really. When you can't find a poet, find a child. Remember that.

Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.

Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how.

. . . poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

someday i will walk under the soul-blossom tree with my hand eternally woven in yours.

The Chinese poet George Wu ... recorded on his comlog: "Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become." Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: "Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

I loved you for a thousand years and missed you in all of them.

Between roars the lion purrs.

Poets, you always write about women worth dying for. Write, for a change, something about the ones worth living for!

i'm so hookedon how your mind works,on what you notice,on everything that excites you.i'm so caught up inhow you see the world,how you see everythingand still offer up your lovefor all to take it.you give me a glimpse of your heartand i can't tell youhow much you turn me on.

Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.

We hold on to poetry because it lights a fire in our soul and keeps our bodies warm.

i am infinitely yearningbrimmingand overflowingin wordsi discoverit’s another wayfor meto be in tears.

To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance-- not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write.

Feminine psychology is admittedly odd, sir. The poet Pope...""Never mind about the poet Pope, Jeeves.""No, sir.""There are times when one wants to hear all about the poet Pope and times when one doesn't.""Very true, sir.

The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.