Poets Quotes

“A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight.”
― Aberjhani

“Sail Forth- Steer for the deep waters only. Reckless O soul, exploring. I with thee and thou with me. For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared go. And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all.”
― Walt Whitman

“A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition

“poetry
melts my bones.
enters my blood.

and changes
its composition.”
― Sanober Khan

“There is no single thing... that is so cut and dried that one cannot attend to its secret whisper which says 'I am more than just my appearance'. If each object quivers with readiness to imply something other than itself, if each perception is a word in a poem dense with connotations, then the poet's selection of any given subject of speculation will become... a means of attuning himself to the rhythms and harmonies of reality at large. ... The notion of a network of correspondence is not an outmoded Romantic illusion: it represents a crucial intuition...”
― Roger Cardinal, Figures of Reality

“Nor is there wanting in the press
Some spirit to stand simply forth,
Heroic in it nakedness,
Against the uttermost of earth.
The tale of earth's unhonored things
Sounds nobler there than 'neath the sun;
And the mind whirls and the heart sings,
And a shout greets the daring one.”
― Robert Frost

“You are the hybrids of golden worlds and ages splendidly conceived.”
― Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry

“Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.”
― Katerina Stoykova Klemer

“We are all poets, really.”
― Walter Lowenfels

“Poets make the best topographers.”
― W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape

“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?”
― Lucia Perillo, Luck Is Luck: Poems

“I believe in the fatal hairdo just for the love of saying fatal hairdo.”
― Lucia Perillo, Luck Is Luck: Poems

“Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.”
― Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology

“When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism.

The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it's fatal to confuse them.

In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent - not especially - but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be written, though there was no way to be sure of this except to attempt the writing; he would raise a finger (the novelist in the bar mirror raising the obverse finger) and push forward his change. Wailing like a neglected ghost, the vast notion would beat its wings into the void.

Sometimes it would pursue him for days and years as he fled desperately. Sometimes he would turn to face it, and do battle. Once, twice, he had been victorious, objectively at least. Out of an immense concatenation of feeling, thought, word, transcendent meaning had come his first novel, a slim, pageant of a book, tombstone for his slain conception. A publisher had taken it, gingerly; had slipped it quietly into the deep pool of spring releases, where it sank without a ripple, and where he supposes it lies still, its calm Bodoni gone long since green. A second, just as slim but more lurid, nightmarish even, about imaginary murders in an imaginary exotic locale, had been sold for a movie, though the movie had never been made. He felt guilt for the producer's failure (which perhaps the producer didn't feel), having known the book could not be filmed; he had made a large sum, enough to finance years of this kind of thing, on a book whose first printing was largely returned.”
― John Crowley, Novelty: Four Stories

“. . . Orpheus struck dumb with hindsight.”
― A. E. Stallings

“Love doesn’t make you a poet; it makes you poetry.”
― Yarro Rai

“Evening came, a paw, to the gray hut by the river.”
― William Stafford

“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.”
― Stephen Spender

“Tužna projekcija života za pjesnika je primamljivija od samog života.”
― Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

“I’m a maker of ballads right pretty
I write them right here in the street
You can buy them all over the city
yours for a penny a sheet
I’m a word pecker out of the printers
out of the dens of Gin Lane
I’ll write up a scene on a counter
- confessions and sins in the main, boys
confessions and sins in the main

Then you’ll find me in Madame Geneva’s
keeping the demons at bay
There’s nothing like gin for drowning them in
but they’ll always be back on a hanging day, on a hanging day

They come rattling over the cobbles
they sit on their coffins of black
Some are struck dumb, some gabble
top-heavy on brandy or sack
The pews are all full of fine fellows
and the hawker has set up her shop
As they’re turning them off at the gallows
she’ll be selling right under the drop, boys
selling right under the drop

Then you’ll find me in Madame Geneva’s
keeping the demons at bay
There’s nothing like gin for drowning them in
but they’ll always be back on a hanging day, on a hanging day”
― Mark Knopfler, Kill to Get Crimson

“Poets can dodge. ("Evening Primrose")”
― John Collier, Fancies and Goodnights

“.
الشمس
تشرق الشمس الذهبية كل يوم على التلة.
الأيكة جميلة، والحيوانات المتوحشة كذلك،
أيضا الرجل: صيادا كان أو مزارعا.

السمك الأحمر يقفز في البركة الخضراء.
تحت قبة السماء
صياد السمك يسافر برفق في زورقه الأزرق الصغير.

البذرة، عناقيد العنب، تنضج على مهل.
وعندما يصل اليوم الهادئ إلى نهايته،
تكون تهيئة كل من الخير والشر قد تمت.

وبحلول الليل،
دون أدنى شك يرفع المسافر جفنيه الثقيلين،
الشمس تهرب من الوديان الكئيبة.”
― Georg Trakl

“The bats inebriate the sky . . .”
― A. E. Stallings

“A single wire hanger on a nail by itself
Isn't bad though a stack of them on a floor
Is too gloomy for words.”
― Dara Weir

“О любви мы знаем немного. Любовь - что груша. Она сладкая и имеет определенную форму. Но попробуйте дать определение формы груши!

© Лютик "Полвека поэзии”
― Sapkovsky A.

“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

“We have conversations with each other most nights - Sylvia Plath and me!”
― Avijeet Das

“Tis the wink of an eye, 'tis the draught of a breath,
From the blossom of health to the paleness of death,
From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud-
Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud?”
― William Knox

“. . . a racer snake / slicking off / like a signature into the weeds.”
― Tony Crunk, New Covenant Bound

“Traps!" he said. "Never in the world! Don't think it! Why, Gower is just a necessary olf bore. Nobody's supposed to know much about him--except instructors and their hapless students.”
― Henry Blake Fuller, Bertram Cope's Year