Best 429 quotes in «poets quotes» category

I turned myself into an artist because then my life would be about creating meaning out of ugliness and that would be my life, and it was noble. It was the beginning of a journey, the creating of the world every single day and I was not bored. I was ecstasy and creation and nothingness turned into melodies and I was dancing with the spirits.

I used to know Brian Howard well -- a dazzling young man to my innocent eyes. In later life he became very dangerous -- constantly attacking people with his fists in public places -- so I kept clear of him. He was consumptive but the immediate cause of his death was a broken heart.

I’ve learned that I am not just a poet, that poets are not just poets. If I could tell my younger self one thing about being a poet...I’d tell her that we contain multitudes.” @Nic_Sealey

it was the kind of moon that I would want to send back to my ancestors and gift to my descendants so they know that I too, have been bruised...by beauty.

i want to be in love with you the same way i am in love with the moon with the light shining out of its soul.

I want to be the one you run to. I want to be the one you miss. I want your arms to hold me through. I want your lips to be mine to kiss. I want to be the one you’re in love with. Eyes opening up my heart like a locksmith. I want to be the one you snuggle. Together creating jealous couples. Love is one of the greatest treasures. Something that cannot be measured. Take me with you on this journey. As long as we’re together, there’re no worries.

Love me...with all the abandon of a sudden wild rain.

I wish to stay drenched forever in those rain-blue eyes in those...soul-reaching crystals not moving a muscle nor breathing just savoring this turquoise ache against my heart.

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.

Morning and evening Maids heard the goblins cry: 'Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy

Musicians do not get on stage without hearing the song singing inside of them. Poets do not write as if they are jotting down a sermon, they see everything in their subconscious before presenting it to the conscious, which they later turn to  readable materials. Artist do not draw and paint without painting in dream states, trance, or see an art form that others do not see. Being creative does not calls for being any supernatural entity, but in creating with the entities inside of you.

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.

Love doesn’t make you a poet; it makes you poetry.

Love is almost never simple.

love is always moving towards you

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

Man cannot live without oxygen, The poets cannot live without love!

Maybe I just didn’t want it to be Benny because he really loves her, and if I was wrong about that, it’d be depressing. Who wants to be depressed?” “Poets,” Eve decided. “You have to think they must.” “Okay, other than poets.

May our twilights mix together like breath and breathlessness.

may this poetry be the home you will someday come back to.

May the nights always be aglow with the bliss of the day with unharmed hands and feet and kissed cheeks.

Men of dreams, the lovers and the poets, are better in most things than the men of my sort; the men of intellect. You take your being from your mothers. You live to the full: it is given you to love with your whole strength, to know and taste the whole of life. We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full reality. Ours is a thin and arid life, but the fullness of being is yours; yours the sap of the fruit, the garden of lovers, the joyous pleasaunces of beauty. Your home is the earth, ours the idea of it. Your danger is to be drowned in the world of sense, ours to gasp for breath in airless space. You are a poet, I a thinker. You sleep on your mother's breast, I watch in the wilderness. On me there shines the sun; on you the moon with all the stars. Your dreams are all of girls, mine of boys—

My Mother _____________ My mother writes poetry sometimes on bits of paper and sometimes in her journal i can never match her depth nor her skill with metaphors the other night while we were talking on the phone about life and writing she read the lines of her poem that she had written she wrote: the night is a woman; she is wearing a dark black saree and the stars are the glitter on her saree's anchal!

My mother, a poet, made me a poet in her womb!

My mother writer poetry sometimes on bits of paper and sometimes in her journal I can neither match her depth nor her skill with metaphors the other night while we were talking on the phone about life and writing she read the lines of her poem that she had written she wrote: the night is a woman; she is wearing a dark black saree and the stars are the glitter on her saree's anchal!

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.

Não sou alegre nem sou triste: sou poeta.

My words are my children. I am eternally grateful to the womb of my mind for conceiving them.

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.

Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so--go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry--without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Transtromer broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco: We got dressed and showed the house You live well the visitor said The slum must be inside you. If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry first. For it is my confirmed bias that the poets remain the most 'stunned by existence,' the most determined to redeem the world in words..

No poet ever wrote a poem to dishonor life, to compromise high ideals, to scorn religious views, to demean hope or gratitude, to argue against tenderness, to place rancor before love, or to praise littleness of soul. Not one. Not ever.

My girl was mad and I loved her. Upon a night, she read my poetry; and kissing me madly she cried, ‘You are a genius, my love!’ To which I replied, ‘My girl,’ whispering, ‘Every doctor in this land with a prescription pad is more of a genius than I.

Nothing is inanimate; what is the rest is our interpretation.

Novelists invent characters; poets invent themselves.

Not words. nor laughter. but rather someone who will fall in love with your silence.

Now that we are all so smart, we don’t easily find resolutions.

Of all nations the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets and will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.

Only the writers can change or fix the past by going back to edit old works

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

My job as a poet, is not to succumb to despair but to find in words, an antidote for the emptiness of existence.

Oh, there are no living poets, Miss Van Damn. We're not entirely sure there ever were. They've found some shreds of sonnets in England and, embedded in a chalk wall of a cave in France, some yet undetermined thing which might be the legendary inward eye. But all evidence, such as it is, suggests that, if there ever were poets, they were all burned into extinction during the interglacial period of despair.

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.

One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.

Now, who and what is this minstrel in reality? Where does he come from? In what respects does he differ from his predecessors? He has been described as a cross between the early medieval court-singer and the ancient mime of classical times. The mime had never ceased to flourish since the days of classical antiquity; when even the last traces of classical culture disappeared, the descendants of the old mimes still continued to travel about the Empire, entertaining the masses with their unpretentious, unsophisticated and unliterary art. The Germanic countries were flooded out with mimes in the early Middle Ages; but until the ninth century the poets and singers at the courts kept themselves strictly apart from them. Not until they lost their cultured audience, as a result of the Carolingian Renaissance and the clericalism of the following generation, and came up against the competition of the mimes in the lower classes, did they have, to a certain extent, to become mimes themselves in order to be able to compete with their rivals. Thus both singers and comedians now move in the same circles, intermingle and influence each other so much that they soon become indistinguishable from one another. The mime and the scop both become the minstrel. The most striking characteristic of the minstrel is his versatility. The place of the cultured, highly specialized heroic ballad poet is now taken by the Jack of all trades, who is no longer merely a poet and singer, but also a musician and dancer, dramatist and actor, clown and acrobat, juggler and bear-leader, in a word, the universal jester and maître de plaisir of the age. Specialization, distinction and solemn dignity are now finished with; the court poet has become everybody’s fool and his social degradation has such a revolutionary and shattering effect on himself that he never entirely recovers from the shock. From now on he is one of the déclassés, in the same class as tramps and prostitutes, runaway clerics and sent-down students, charlatans and beggars. He has been called the ‘journalist of the age’, but he really goes in for entertainment of every kind: the dancing song as well as the satirical song, the fairy story as well as the mime, the legend of saints as well as the heroic epic. In this context, however, the epic takes on quite new features: it acquires in places a more pointed character with a new straining after effect, which was absolutely foreign to the spirit of the old heroic ballad. The minstrel no longer strikes the gloomy, solemn, tragi-heroic note of the ‘Hildebrandslied’, for he wants to make even the epic sound entertaining; he tries to provide sensations, effective climaxes and lively epigrams. Compared with the monuments of the older heroic poetry, the ‘Chanson de Roland’ never fails to reveal this popular minstrel taste for the piquant.

. . . Orpheus struck dumb with hindsight.

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.

O' sprite full Maia, come attire our lands with your boundless prize,of joyful swelling by the nature's pleasing bloom and green surprise; to sprout a floral bedding round the yards and shades for worthy dales;and birds will spin their adorned bowers over the dewy boughs and vales.

O, only left to myself, what a poet I will flay myself into.

People wonder at the romantic lives of poets and artists, but they should rather wonder at their gift of expression. The occurrences which pass unnoticed in the life of the average man in the existence of a writer of talent are profoundly interesting. It is the man they happen to that makes their significance.

[poems are] crystals deposited after the effervescent contact of the spirit with reality. (cristaux deposes apres l'effervescent contact de l'esprit avec la realite)