Poets Quotes

“A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner; nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Literature

“We must listen to poets.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.”
― W.H. Auden

“a silent night. - the most eloquent poem i have ever read.”
― Sanober Khan

“Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create

“There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either”
― Robert Graves

“Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.”
― William Edgar Stafford, Every War Has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War

“Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.”
― A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

“Poets are interested primarily in death and commas. ”
― Carolyn Kizer

“no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.”
― W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays

“Them lady poets must not marry, pal . . . It is a true error to marry with poets / or to be by them.”
― John Berryman, The Dream Songs

“August is dust here. Drought
stuns the road,
but juice gathers in the berries.”
― Robert Hass, Praise

“A poem is a meteor.”
― Wallace Stevens

“When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt

“… the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder.”
― Yannis Ritsos, The Fourth Dimension

“All good poems are victories over something.”
― Stephen Dunn

“This dream the world is having about itself
includes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,
a groove in the grass my father showed us all
one day while meadowlarks were trying to tell
something better about to happen.”
― William Stafford, The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems

“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.”
― Andre Breton

“In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo's male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets.”
― Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study Of Some Transitional Types Of Men And Women

“Le Poëte est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

“Different languages, the same thoughts; servant to thoughts and their masters.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun

“It’s not easy to write a poem about a poem.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“My sudden, unforeseen capitulation had knocked me backward, and I had nothing to hold on to. My internal weather was eerily calm, as if in a tornado's aftermath, birdsong, sunshine, supersaturated colors, wreckage all around, and myself, dazed and limping.”
― Kate Christensen, The Astral

“It is ferocious, life, but it must eat . . .”
― Lucia Perillo, Luck Is Luck: Poems

“One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.”
― Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology

“Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.”
― Rick Yancey, The Isle of Blood

“The poet must be more useful than any other member if his tribe.”
― Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and the Complete Works

“Criticism is like politics: if you don't make your own you are by default accepting the status quo and are finally yourself responsible for whatever the status quo does to you.”
― Annie Finch, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self

“Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet

“She asked me "what is it about
these people -

the silent ones,
the thinking ones,
and the brooding ones


why do I get drawn
to them

without knowing them?

what is it about them?

is there a magnetic
force about them?

or do they cast a spell
on me?

what is it
about these people!

the misfits
the poets,
the writers,

the painters,
the singers,

the dancers,
the musicians,

and all the ones
who create art?

what is it
that pulls me
to them?

is it
their craft
their passion

their words
their thoughts

their loneliness.
their life?

what is it about
these people?"

And I smiled
and said "I will
search the answers
to your questions
in my loneliness.”
― Avijeet Das