Top 97 Poem Poetry Poet Quotes
#1. So Lightning says to Mud,
"What would happen if I struck your blood?"
And Mud says, "Brother,
It would hurt,
And make me the mother
Of every living thing.
But, Fire Boy, you ain't lifting my grass skirt
Until you burn me a ring.
Sherman Alexie
#2. I chase the wind and get lost in the clouds. I'm sweep into darkness in my search for the light.
Sherman Kennon
#3. I do not write to you, but of you,/because the paper that we write on/is our perishable skin.
Melissa Lee-Houghton
#4. My father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet, so I had one right inside the house. And on long trips, he'd tell me, if I got bored in the car, to write a poem about it. And I did find that poetry was a way for me, I think as it for a lot of people, to articulate those things that seem hardest to say.
Natasha Trethewey
#5. And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night
Archibald MacLeish
#6. You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.
Rick Riordan
#7. Poetry is another name for a person's telling of the self, existence and what is beyond, and one's own perceptions.
M. Fethullah Gulen
#8. How - I didn't know any
word for it - how "unlikely" ...
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?
Elizabeth Bishop
#9. Poetry is a storm asking peace to dance with her.
Jenim Dibie
#11. I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.
Michael Faraday
#12. To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance
not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write.
Richard Hugo
#14. I'm burning in despair
Love which you distanced from me
Return once again
I'll forgive you again
Return, Page 19
Delicious David
#16. A perfect poem owes its perfection to sounding the voice of the heart and the melodies of the conscience, as well as its ability to reflect the considerations, beliefs, opinions, and horizons of thought of the poet, but not due to its formal or mental aspects.
M. Fethullah Gulen
#17. Once
There was a quiet island,
With a name.
You must believe me
When I say that sunlight,
Impure but beautiful,
Broke upon the bay, silvered
The unrepentant, burning moon.
Edwin Thumboo
#18. Life writes the poetry, but it will always call for witnesses and scribes alike to tattoo its echoes upon the ghosts of trees.
Ged Thompson
#19. no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
W. H. Auden
#20. This poem was meant
to be unwritten.
But I am writing it now
and have thereby changed
destiny.
Kamand Kojouri
#22. According to Charles Olsen, the best poetry is a kind of schizophrenia. The poem does not "express" the poet's thoughts or feelings. It is "a transfer of energy between the poet and the reader".
Chris Kraus
#24. I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized ... A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.
William Carlos Williams
#25. The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion ... elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant.
Denise Levertov
#26. What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.
T. S. Eliot
#27. I see the life with your sight,
O" the love; you're my light.
Debasish Mridha
#28. I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
Howard Nemerov
#29. You should be more careful
when you move, my dear
what with you...
spilling moonlight
into my poem, with a mere
flick of your hand.
Sanober Khan
#30. The commitment to working at poetry is important because a poet is a maker, and a poem is a made thing. We have to honor our feelings by working to transform them into something meaningful and lasting.
Edward Hirsch
#31. Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance
Philip Larkin
#32. A Coy Aversion
...a flutter
too shy
to be seen...
Muse
#33. Autumn
The passion
Is still flourishing in the branches
Yellow funny and daring red
The sun warms even in the days
Where the fog
Stubbornly in the morning
From a distance
A woodpecker knocks
Impermanence
Is the enemy of beauty
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
#34. In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
W. H. Auden
#35. Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!
Elizabeth Bishop
#36. You ask me to write you a poem,
I pen you an empty ocean,
You run away.
You ask me who I am,
I paint you a breaking sky,
You weep in the rain.
Jenim Dibie
#38. Never durst a poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink was tempered with love's sighs.
William Shakespeare
#39. A lie is still a lie
even if it's disguised
as the truth.
Sherman Kennon
#41. As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can't put toothbrushes in a poem. I really can't.
Sylvia Plath
#42. Euphemisms chosen by fear are a covenant with hypocrisy and will immediately destroy the poem and eventually destroy the poet.
Lenore Kandel
#43. This longing inside me that never goes away, must be a poem ... must be you ...
John Geddes
#44. YOUR WORDS ARE MADE OF THE AIR I BREATHE.
Amy King
#45. I'm a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know.
Tennessee Williams
#46. We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble.
Emily Dickinson
#47. Imperfection is my ticket, perfection is my pursuit
Paul Travis
#48. You do not need a boyfriend or a girlfriend to write an emotional poet; because poetry is beyond hooks and holes.
M.F. Moonzajer
#49. To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.
Laura Riding
#50. I plan to be a sinner tonight. Could've been something else, but looked way too good in my red dress to be anything Christian.
Alysia Harris
#51. As I read you I fell in love with the holes between your words and I loved you most on the days you could not love yourself.
Jenim Dibie
#52. You are a poem--and that is to be the best part of a poet--what makes up the
poet's consciousness in his best moods.
George Eliot
#53. I loved you for a thousand years and missed you in all of them.
Christina Strigas
#55. Men and women who are lonely create. Those who are gregarious rarely do ... Any poet would rather bed with a girl than write a poem about her. All art is the result of frustration. Art is energy deflected from its normal course in action.
Burton Rascoe
#56. ONE WORD
One word
- one stone
in a cold river.
One more stone
I'll need many stones
if I'm going to get over.
Olav H. Hauge
#57. I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.
Philip Larkin
#58. The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone.
Edward Hirsch
#59. How does a poet know when a poem is ended? Because it lies flat, taut; nothing can be added or subtracted. How does a woman know when a marriage is over? Because of the way her life suddenly shears off in just two directions: past and future.
Carol Shields
#60. Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#61. The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.
Edward Hirsch
#62. Ink marks the page/where you execute your will like a doe announcing an/ox-stern mate with a single, bleary blink.
Melissa Lee-Houghton
#64. Tonight, I won't dream, because nobody
has held me and no hands have strayed and even
though I'm drunk with love, my arms are empty.
Melissa Lee-Houghton
#65. The only gift is a portion of thyself ... the poet brings his poem; the shepherd his lamb ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#67. Now is History as fast as the mind remembers.
Kirby Wright
#69. Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.
Natasha Trethewey
#70. I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act.
We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin.
-In the yellow time of pollen
Luke Davies
#71. Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
Philip Larkin
#72. The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.
John Ciardi
#73. Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.
'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem.
Karen Tei Yamashita
#74. Poetry is the sister of Sorrow. Every man that suffers and weeps is a poet; every tear is a verse, and every heart a poem.
Marc-Andre Fleury
#75. One has to commit a painting,' said Degas,
'the way one commits a crime.
Elizabeth Bishop
#76. if you
don't want to
end up in
someone else's
poem,
then maybe
you should
start
treating
people
better
for
a
change.
- an unapologetic poet.
Amanda Lovelace
#77. She was not a poet. She was a poem. She was about to snap in half. He thought his own poetry had made her la la la la love him. It was unbearable.
Deborah Levy
#78. The poem is the poet, the dreamer the dream.
Marty Rubin
#79. If you want to write poetry, you must have poems that deeply move you. Poems you can't live without. I think of a poem as the blood in a blood transfusion, given from the heart of the poet to the heart of the reader. Seek after poems that live inside you, poems that move through your veins.
Ralph Fletcher
#80. I was born one thousand times and all the while it was you I met again to only meet again under the thousand stars that divide us and connect us.
Christina Strigas
#82. Don't ask me any questions. I've seen how things that seek their way find their void instead.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#83. The tragedy of love is in its ending,
the blessing - everything else.
No love ever deserves to end.
Akif Kichloo
#84. Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.
James Laughlin
#85. A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Jean Cocteau
#86. I am the poet, you are the poem; I hold the pen, you are the words, love is the ink, silence is the blank page.
Jenim Dibie
#87. The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely.
Louise Bogan
#88. I sat in a box
With walls on each side.
Not too tall.
Not too wide.
To think.
To ponder.
To pray.
To hide.
I sat in a box and cried.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#89. When your heart starts to feel full again. I love FREE refills, and if a restaurant tries to double charge me, I refuse to write a love poem on their Yelp page.
-Karen Quan and Jarod Kintz
Karen Quan
#90. With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.
Lascelles Abercrombie
#93. Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.
Dorianne Laux
#94. Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.
Octavio Paz
#95. You know that the nucleus of a time is not
The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind
Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed
As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins
Nor stand there making orotund consolations.
He shares the confusions of intelligence.
Wallace Stevens
#97. Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
'Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy
Christina Rossetti
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