Top 66 Poets On Poetry Quotes
#1. SELF
BENEATH THE SURFACE,
VEILED ON PURPOSE,
ALL KNOWING AND GRAND,
DIRECTED, GUIDED, BY THE ETERNAL HAND,
SUSTAINED, FULFILLED, FULL OF LIGHT,
REALIZATION ACHIEVED, BY WILLFUL MIGHT.
Charles Edward
#2. let me die
from having being drunk on
indigo skies, my liver...
overflowing with stars.
Sanober Khan
#3. Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived ... Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.
Andrew Motion
#4. Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.
James Laughlin
#5. This was what the poets couldn't put in their poetry, she thought dumbly, the rush of desire so fierce and pure it made one shake, all on the force of a word.
Lauren Willig
#6. If you do not even understand what words say,
how can you expect to pass judgement
on what words conceal?
H.D.
#7. In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others.
Stephen Burt
#8. The hills
like poets put on
purple thought against
the
magnificent clamor of
day
tortured
in gold
E. E. Cummings
#9. Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
G.K. Chesterton
#10. Just look what happens to poets," I used to tell my honors class on the first day of school. "Half the time they go mad. And you know why I think that happens? Too much truth distilled to its essence, all surrounding evidence ignored or discarded. And I'm not faulting them for that.
Steve Yarbrough
#11. The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.
Mary Oliver
#12. Naturally, etiquette books order handwashing before as well as after meals, but the practice also appears, with a frequency that borders on obsession, in poetry. Poets found it hard to describe a banquet or even a meal without affirming that everyone washed their hands.
Katherine Ashenburg
#13. When there's a moon the shadows in the house grow larger;
invisible hands draw back the curtains,
a pallid finger writes forgotten words on dust
of the piano ...
Yiannis Ritsos
#14. They say that history is going on somewhere.
They say it won't stop. I have held
One picture still for a long time and waited.
William Stafford
#15. Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
Anne Stevenson
#16. I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet
buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture
than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.
Mary Karr
#17. The next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.
Annie Finch
#18. A pear should come to the table popped with juice,
Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms
Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.
Wallace Stevens
#19. A single poem, alone
can turn tides
scatter galaxies
and burst forth with rivers
from paradise.
Sanober Khan
#20. I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.
Paul Auster
#22. Too often, feelings arrive too soon, waiting for thoughts that often come too late.
Dejan Stojanovic
#23. A stress on the system and I think a painful thing for many young poets who are looking to find a life in poetry that they're not going to be able to find.
Edward Hirsch
#24. I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn't some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that's happening around us.
Rita Dove
#26. Poets, with no sponsors, no agenda, are the truest form of freedom today, bleeding out every drop of themselves for the world to either hate or devour.
Jason E. Hodges
#27. So I don't think I'll make Poet Laureate,
but I swear I'm not twisted and bitter,
If finely-wrought talents
don't weigh in the balance,
I can always write haiku on Twitter.
Rosy Cole
#28. We will read books together inside the blanket and stay warm. And keep writing poetry in our respective journals. Time will fly but we will still remain inside the blanket forever.
Avijeet Das
#29. I write because there are things in me that cannot die.
Sanober Khan
#30. a single poem
the thing that can keep me
light on my feet,
when my soul is
heavy with sorrow.
Sanober Khan
#31. I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.
Anais Nin
#32. Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something - with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.
Louis MacNeice
#33. Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.
Adrienne Rich
#34. Poets will never be the highest-paid writers in the world. Instead, poetry will go on cutting a hand-made path through the mass-market insanity. For me, anyway, that path is the one that leads to the Chapel of the Grail.
Jeanette Winterson
#35. From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#36. The obscure, unexplainable aspect of the writing process is about how some rhymes appear in your head. It often feels more like tuning in to some kind of channel than composing words in your mind.
Sahara Sanders
#38. I've been told by many the art of poetry's dead, I believe it's alive on pages they haven't read
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#39. Burning the witch Giordano Bruno is one more wound inflicted on Christ's body.
Dejan Stojanovic
#40. On sighting mathematicians poetry should unhook the algebra from their minds and replace it with poetry; on sighting poets it should unhook poetry from their minds and replace it with algebra.
Brian Patten
#41. A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.
Munia Khan
#42. And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.
Virginia Woolf
#43. The difference between poets and mystics ... The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it's true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.
Neal Stephenson
#44. The pen, a double-edged mystery: cuts the writer, heals the reader.
Jenim Dibie
#45. Poetry has saved me on occasions when people couldn't.
Sanober Khan
#46. Being a poet in the States is quite different from being one in China, because in the States poetry depends on the universities for its support. They finance the poets and help them get published. That isn't so in China. But overall it is the same. You can't change society with poetry.
Bei Dao
#47. As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry.
Simon Armitage
#48. On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.
Michael Cunningham
#49. every choice i have ever made after you existed
has been dependent on exactly
how close i can have you next to me
and how long i can get you to stay.
AVA.
#50. I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.
Robert Hass
#51. Advice to Young Poets
Never pretend
to be a unicorn
by sticking a plunger on your head.
Martin Espada
#52. It is a curious thing how poets tend to become ascetics ... Even a debauch for them is a self-flagellation. They go on the loose in cruelty against themselves, admitting that they are pandering to, and despising, the lower self.
D.H. Lawrence
#53. A writer will divine a metaphor from a pattern on a dress, or a gesture, because sunsets have been done before.
Brandi L. Bates
#54. I loved you for a thousand years and missed you in all of them.
Christina Strigas
#55. Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry
William Empson
#56. 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
#57. Talent is a faucet. When it is on, one must write. Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.
Jean Anouilh
#58. This dream the world is having about itself
includes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,
a groove in the grass my father showed us all
one day while meadowlarks were trying to tell
something better about to happen.
William Stafford
#60. A single wire hanger on a nail by itself
Isn't bad though a stack of them on a floor
Is too gloomy for words.
Dara Weir
#61. There are horrible events going on all over the world. Human beings are really fucking up. Poets, we can't just write poems. We have to put poems into action.
Jeremiah Walton
#62. Secretly, deep down, everybody on Earth believes they can write poetry, apart from the members of the Poets' Guild, who know they can't.
K.J. Parker
#63. We have conversations with each other most nights - Sylvia Plath and me!
Avijeet Das
#64. We hold on to poetry because it lights a fire in our soul and keeps our bodies warm.
Sanober Khan
#65. My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands.
Bob Dylan
#66. 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.
Dean Koontz
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