Poet Quotes - Page 28

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

Creatures crawl in search of blood to terrorize your neighborhood. And whosoever shall be found without the soul for getting down, must stand and face the hounds of hell, and rot inside a corpse's shell.

One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.

I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.

Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering--I mean remembering in words--what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives.

In a lethal world, poetry is necessary for survival.

The critic ... should be not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three.

... For me it is essential, essential for the poet to have a new toast, new songs.

Gently touching with the charm of poetry.

I am the scroll of the poet behind which samurai swords are being sharpened.

Kierkegaard was once asked, 'What is a poet?' He answered that a poet was an unhappy man whose moans and cries of anguish were transformed into ravishing music.

The poem is a structure of signifiers which absorbs and reconstitutes the signified.

When power corrupts, poetry cleanses

Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not posses it) and thus need not fear its loss.

Part of the strength of Pollock and Rothko's art, in fact, is this doubt as to whether art may be there at all.

Superstition is the poesy of practical life; hence, a poet is none the worse for being superstitious.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.

Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.

It ["The Ancient Mariner"] is marvellous in its mastery over that delightfully fortuitous inconsequence that is the adamantine logic of dreamland.

The philosophic mind inclines always to an elaborate life--the life of Goethe or of Leonardo da Vinci; but the life of the poet isintense--the life of Blake or of Dante--taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.

There is no question that the language of "felt thought" must be quarried from our personal depths. Like the best gold, it does not lie on the surface.