Best Poet Quotes

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

How poetry comes to the poet is a mystery.

Most writers – poets in especial – prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy – an ecstatic intuition – and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face!

Science is not addressed to poets.

All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.

The scientist has marched in and taken the place of the poet. But one day somebody will find the solution to the problems of the world and remember, it will be a poet, not a scientist.

Bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage, an early success or the ability to do anything well.

Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life?

There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world’s sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example.

The lamp you lighted in the olden time Will show you my heart’s-blood beating through the rhyme: A poet’s journal, writ in fire and tears… Then slow deliverance, with the gaps of years.

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.

My business is words. Words are like labels,or coins, or better, like swarming bees.

For the Persian poet Rumi, each human life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean. As it moves along, it is slowly filling with the water around it. That’s a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge. When the water in the bowl finally reaches the same level as the water outside, there is no longer any need for the container, and it drops away as the inner water merges with the outside water. We call this the moment of death. That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.

Artist – musicians, painters, writers, poets, always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.

I had the title poet, and maybe I was one for a while. Also, the title singer was kindly accorded me, even though I could barely carry a tune.

I alwaysthought of myself as a competent, minor poet. I know who I’m up against.

All the lousy little poets coming around trying to sound like Charles Manson.

I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he’s written poetry then let the verdict be that he’s a poet.

It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back.

He continued on, on to the glacier, towards the dawn, from ridge to ridge, in deep, new-fallen snow, paying no heed to the storms that might pursue him. As a child he had stood by the seashore at Ljósavík and watched the waves soughing in and out, but now he was heading away from the sea. Think of me when you are in glorious sunshine. Soon the sun of the day of resurrection will shine on the bright paths where she awaits her poet. And beauty shall reign alone.

Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create.

In England, coffeehouses were dubbed penny-universities, because for the admission price of one cent, a person could sit and be edified all day long by scholars, merchants, travelers, community leaders, gossips, and poets.

Did men but know that there was a fixed limit to their woes, they would be able, in some measure, to defy the religious fictions and menaces of the poets; but now, since we must fear eternal punishment at death, there is no mode, no means, of resisting them.

Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side,
And madness chooses out my voice again,
Again.

Ibn Firnas was a polymath: a physician, a rather bad poet, the first to make glass from stones (quartz), a student of music, and inventor of some sort of metronome.

Let us define ‘man’ as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.

My sisters were going out with artists and poets, and eventually it was the creative world which attracted me.

Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.

Every poet knows the pun is Pierian, that it springs from the same soil as the Muse?a matching and shifting of vowels and consonants, an adroit assonance sometimes derided as jackassonance.

Whether we are poets or parents or teachers or artists or gardeners, we must start where we are and use what we have. In the process of creation and relationship, what seems mundane and trivial may show itself to be a holy, precious part of a pattern.

But Racine’s extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great psychologist.

Nay, the greatest wits and poets, too, cease to live;
Homer, their prince, sleeps now in the same forgotten sleep as do the others.
[Lat., Adde repertores doctrinarum atque leporum;
Adde Heliconiadum comites; quorum unus Homerus
Sceptra potitus, eadem aliis sopitu quiete est.]