Poets Quotes

I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods.

On the last day of the worldI would want to plant a tree

An owl sound wandered along the road with me.I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.

I had no more alphabetthan the journeying of the swallows, the pure and tiny waterof the small, fiery birdthat dances rising from the pollen.

Between roars the lion purrs.

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

Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.

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?

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

Poetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

Poets make the best topographers.

. . . Orpheus struck dumb with hindsight.

Evening came, a paw, to the gray hut by the river.

The bats inebriate the sky . . .

A single wire hanger on a nail by itselfIsn't bad though a stack of them on a floorIs too gloomy for words.

. . . a racer snake / slicking off / like a signature into the weeds.

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

All we’re trying to do is word the world. Detail is one way we do that. We enumerate, notate, name the things seen.

We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.

A poet is a feeling, sentient being, not a word machine.

Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.

That is why they have poets—to classify all the degrees of love. It is for scientists to classify the maladies arising from the want of it.

A poet's fantasy: Hiring a rapper to rap his rhymes.

The eclipses ofpoets are not foretold in the calender.

On a small table beside his chair were other haphazardly stacked volumes by such poets as Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, a dangerous crew to let into your head.

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

The poet must be more useful than any other member if his tribe.

The poets carry feelings, delivering desires and dispatching dreams. Even if sometimes they need pack some sorrows, distill several disappointments and filter strange nightmares.

There are poets, there are philosophers, there are spiritualists and me. I try to foot the bill of these mighty three.

There are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them... Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.

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

Let’s not be too harsh where poets are concerned. They have to live in no-man’s-land, halfway between dreams and reality.

Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour.

What’s the use of writing poetry for your peers? I don’t think I should sell my poetry to other poets. If that’s who my audience is, I’m dead, I’m not going to make any money.

Chance is your godThough you're falling free you will land hard

I'm a wanderessI'm a one night standDon't belong to no cityDon't belong to no man(Note: These lyrics were inspired by Roman Payne's quote from his novel "The Wanderess".)

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

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

One of Wordsworth's Lake District neighbours remarked upon hearing of the poet's death "I suppose his son will carry on the business."

Poetry is not a profession it's a destiny.

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.

The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's.

There's no money in poetry but then there's no poetry in money either.

The essentials of poetry are rhythm dance and the human voice.

Most joyful let the Poet be it is through him that all men see.

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those that do.

A good poet is someone who manages in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning five or six times.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is prose - words in their best order poetry - the best words in their best order.

When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.