Quotes about poets

There are countless circles of hell believers never penetrate the ninth circle.

There are many secrets don’t try to resolve them all.

He confided his deepest secret to you be always wary of his secret.

He thought others were small that was his greatness.

Darkness does not age nothing is always nothing

Unborn eternity does not die existence is dying and falls asleep in the eternity beyond existence.

A versifier arranges words and rhymes into verses a poet arranges verses and rhymes into meanings.

A versifier arranges sounds a poet arranges meaning in the sounds.

Novelists invent characters poets invent themselves.

God has his poets they let him dream.

That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud and the world overhears them

Inside is where we meet everyone else it's on the outside that we are truly alone.

The most sublime labour of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... This philological-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world's childhood men were by nature sublime poets...

It may well be on such a night of clouds and cruel colors that there is brought forth upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a poet of law I say you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden.

The world is a fairy tale we are its guardians.

A poet is not an apostle he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

They grew they did not talk about growing.

A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people.

A versifier passes through the sound sounds go through a poet.

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

Faith is a question of eyesight even the blind can see that.

Remember that good poets too can write bad poems! Talent has also a talent to be untalented!

funny how our heartswere designed to loveso fiercely.but break ever so gently.

My face responds without authorization from my brain, so the resulting smile feels like the biggest, most unguarded, goofiest smile I’ve ever unleashed in my entire life. I didn’t even know my face could do this. It’s like there were hidden zippers in my cheeks. Jesus. This must be what feelings are. This is why people write poems! I get it now. I get it, and I want more.

you make autumn misttaste like champagne and turn winter raininto the elixir of life itself.

But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost's poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along for good luck!

If the poets offered us nothing more than another make-believe world, they would be mere sellers of drugs or, at best, sweetmeats.

Love me...with all the abandonof a sudden wild rain.

for all I can really do isstand herein September’s rainsavoring…soaking it all inslipping..and simplyholding on to poetryfor dear life.

love is always moving towards you

Authority forgets a dying king

let me diefrom having being drunk onindigo skies, my liver...overflowing with stars.

I live there...where the birds are infiniteeverywherewhere they fleeit's a place your eyes can wanderbut never seeWhere everyone accepts me,Without any pretenseIt's a place your mind can picturebut never really comprehend.

someday i will walk under the soul-blossom tree with my hand eternally woven in yours.

when i write of you, my deari am holding youin the most exquisiteways.

A poem in the heart is worthmore than a million dollarsin the bank account.

You touched my heart...ever so softlyand I realizedtears had never been...merely saltand the rainOh the Rain!had never been merely water.

All things want to float.

I is for immortality, which for some poets is a necessary compensation. Presumably miserable in this life, they will be remembered when the rest of us are long forgotten. None of them asks about the quality of that remembrance--what it will be like to crouch in the dim hallways of somebody's mind until the moment of recollection occurs, or to be lifted off suddenly and forever into the pastures of obscurity. Most poets know better than to concern themselves with such things. They know the chance

She day-dreams just as I do. She is addicted to her solitude just as I am. She loves watching the rain-drops fall slowly on to the green leaves of an old guava tree just as I do. She loves drifting in time and time travel just as I do. She loves looking at the waves dashing against the rocks just as I do.

Sometimes poets expect me to think far deeper than I'm willing to dig.

Why do I write? Out of fear. Out of fear that the memory of the people I write about might go lost. Out of fear that the memory of myself might get lost. Or even just to be shielded by a story, to slip inside a story and stop being recognizable, controllable, subject to blackmail.

Come writers and criticsWho prophesize with your penAnd keep your eyes wideThe chance won't come againAnd don't speak too soonFor the wheel's still in spinAnd there's no tellin' whoThat it's namin'For the loser nowWill be later to winFor the times they are a-changin'.

Give me a life time by the fire, with a book in my hand, nothing more and I will tell you a great story.

I learn life from the poets.

The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.

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.

There is no moral to my song,I praise no right, I blame no wrong;I tell of things that I have seen,I show the man that I have beenAs simply as a poet canWho knows himself poet and man.

He would write and write. He would make wonderful things happen. Some of it would be true. All of it would be true. Most of it would be true.

Folks say I've never been quite right since - but they only say that because I'm a poet, and because nothing ever worries me. Poets are so rare in Blair Water folks don't understand them, and most people worry so much, they think you're not right if you don't worry.

To love is a natural instinct. To be loved is “something”. To be loved like crazy, like their life depends on you is a once-in-a-lifetime feeling. How many of us can keep their right hand on their heart and say that they have actually experienced something like that? Not many, I guess. Because you know what, once-in-a-lifetime moments, well, come once in a lifetime. You either have to extremely, enormously and tremendously lucky or have to manage to fascinate a poet or a painter or someone reall

Irish improves a poet.

It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing - otherwise everything and everyone would be speaking once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to things. Rilke privileges two categories of 'entities' [Seienden), to express it in the papery diction of philosophy, that are eligible for the lofty task of acting as message-things - artifices and living creatures - with the latter gaining their particular quality from the former, as if animals were being'

Good or bad, positive or negative, there is no comment more insulting to a poet than one displaying that you have not properly read and considered the things they wrote.

That's a poet.''I thought you said it was a bo-at.''Stupid pet! Don't you know what a poet it?''Why, a thing to sail on the water in.''Well, perhaps you're not so far wrong. Some poets do carry people over the sea....'...'A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it too.

I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it

Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager so lucid or dangerous, than a poet.

I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.

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

the gods are created by poets" --Ovid

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.

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

Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

I have tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy.

Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

Poets are the sense, philosophers­­ the intelligence­­ of humanity.

He wanders, like a day-appearing dream,Through the dim wildernesses of the mind; Through desert woods and tracts, which seem Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.

Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.

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

A change of style is a change of meaning.

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

Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

Between roars the lion purrs.

All good poems are victories over something.

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

One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.

Still, no one finally knows what a poet is supposed either to be or to do. Especially in this country, one takes on the job—because all that one does in America is considered a "job"—with no clear sense as to what is required or where one will ultimately be led. In that respect, it is as particular an instance of a "calling" as one might point to. For years I've kept in mind, "Many are called but few are chosen." Even so "called," there were no assurances that one would be answered.

Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.

For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet

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?

With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a lady’s album – and this is always a gallant thing to do, whatever you may say.

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.

I’m a maker of ballads right prettyI write them right here in the streetYou can buy them all over the cityyours for a penny a sheetI’m a word pecker out of the printersout of the dens of Gin LaneI’ll write up a scene on a counter- confessions and sins in the main, boysconfessions and sins in the mainThen you’ll find me in Madame Geneva’skeeping the demons at bayThere’s nothing like gin for drowning them inbut they’ll always be back on a hanging day, on a hanging dayThey come rattling over the co

Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.

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 . . .

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.

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.

A poet is someone who never forgets they were born naked.

I want to tell you why poetry is worth thinking about - from time to time. Not all the time. Sometimes it's a much better idea to think about other things.Most of us have a short period of intense thinking about poetry, when we take a class in college, and then that's about it. And that's really all you need. One intense time, when you master your little heap of names - Andrew Marvel, Muriel Rukeyser, Christina Rosetti, Hardy, Auden, Bishop, Marvin Bell, Ted Hughes, John Hollander, Nicholas Chri