Top 100 Quotes About Poets Writing
#1. Poets writing in English have long learned to mourn from classical precedents. They have drawn on a tradition of pastoral elegies, which incorporate the dead into the cycles of nature, that runs from Theocritus' Idylls to John Milton's 'Lycidas' and Percy Shelley's 'Adonais.'
Susan Stewart
#2. I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.
Mary Oliver
#3. When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off.
Philip Larkin
#4. Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.
Anne Waldman
#5. 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
#6. You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.
Bob Dylan
#7. Novelists have to love humanity to write anything worthwhile. Poets have to love themselves.
Marita Golden
#8. I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.
Marilyn Hacker
#9. When a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was ... this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.
Orhan Pamuk
#11. The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.
Sara Sheridan
#12. The pen, a double-edged mystery: cuts the writer, heals the reader.
Jenim Dibie
#13. 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
#14. Poets, like fighters, both reap the benefits of roadwork.
Cameron Conaway
#15. He was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time.
James Baldwin
#16. A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.
Munia Khan
#17. Inside is where we meet everyone else; it's on the outside that we are truly alone.
Charles Simic
#18. Our poets do not write about it; our artists do not try to portray this remarkable thing. I don't know why. Is nobody inspired by our present picture of the universe? The value of science remains unsung by singers ... This is not yet a scientific age ...
Richard P. Feynman
#19. So far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in their mission. The little we know about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little we write about it has been written better by poets and novelists.
Harry Harlow
#20. When I began writing, I didn't read any other children's poets ... I didn't want to be influenced until I'd found my own voice. Now I read them all.
Jack Prelutsky
#21. When poets - write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.
Joyce Carol Oates
#23. Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.
Robert Morgan
#24. Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.
Umberto Eco
#25. People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children's story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great poets to be dead. And these are all very difficult expectations to fulfill, I think.
C. JoyBell C.
#26. Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.
Sara Sheridan
#27. Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn't write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn't matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well.
Kurt Vonnegut
#28. 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
#29. i am infinitely yearning
brimming
and overflowing
in words
i discover
it's another way
for me
to be in tears.
Sanober Khan
#30. Superior poets say what they really feel. Mediocre poets say what they decide to feel. Inferior poets say what they think they should feel.
Alvaro De Campos
#31. Contemporary poets got so obscure that poetry kind of fell out of favor,
Paul Ruffin
#32. I write to forget the days that broke me into a million nights.
Jenim Dibie
#33. You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.
David Denby
#34. If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn't write a single word, but that would be tragic.
Dejan Stojanovic
#35. When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art.
James Arthur
#36. Poets find truth by writing about what they love.
Susan Cooper
#37. Some of my favorite poets had a tremendous sense of whimsy, so it's a writing style I guess I admire.
Jewel
#38. 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
#39. Brilliant. [Lasdun] seems to me certainly among the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English, and far better than many who are more famous. His capacities are solidly established; his promise is nearly infinite.
Anthony Hecht
#40. I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die.
Umberto Eco
#41. A lot of artists use memories. A lot of prose writers, a lot of poets, a lot of songwriters, refer back to something. Generally it's all you've got, unless you're brilliant and can write totally in the now.
Paul McCartney
#42. So, the process of revision, it's not systematic. But for me, I mean, I know a lot of poets who write out a draft and then revise it and I think they're happier people. But, I'm just not able to do it that way. I need to just continually examine it as I do it.
Edward Hirsch
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets;Jonson was theVirgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I love Shakespeare.
John Dryden
#46. Poets, when they write of love, give themselves and everyone else away!
Phyllis Bottome
#47. How....will I ever truly depict you?
You're perfect, my writing isn't.
Sanober Khan
#48. The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
Robert Morgan
#49. i write
because
it is
the only way
i can
reach you.
Sanober Khan
#51. No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down
impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.
Muriel Rukeyser
#52. I mainly wanted non-english writing poets, because I loved the idea that I was translating translations.
Simone Muench
#53. People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.
Charles Bukowski
#54. I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant.
Aberjhani
#56. Poets should never stop writing, because their words could be a powerful inspiration to someone else, whether it be now or 100 years from today.
Delano Johnson
#57. It is kind of ridiculous that a poet is expected to live in the real world.
Sanober Khan
#58. Whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
Randall Jarrell
#59. The whole world goes on and on about love. Poets spend their lives writing about it. Everyone thinks it's the most wonderful thing. But, when you mention two guys in love, they forget all that and freak out.
Mark A. Roeder
#60. Feckless Fixation [10w]
Poets worry too much about other poets instead of writing.
Beryl Dov
#61. It's the first thing I tell my students: If you could understand, really understand, that no one needs to read your work, then your writing would improve vastly by the time we meet in this classroom again.
Dan Barden
#63. I don't write very much about penises. More than some poets but not perhaps as much as I should.
Rachel Zucker
#64. We have conversations with each other most nights - Sylvia Plath and me!
Avijeet Das
#65. More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.
Eric Hoffer
#66. That is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life all around me. I also write because when I am writing I reach the high moment of fusion sought by the mystics, the poets, the lovers, a sense of communion with the universe.
Anais Nin
#67. Like every great writer before or since, Jonson understood that the best poets 'are both made and born'. That all great writing has to be hammered out and all great poets stand or fall by that 'second heat', their laboured revision.
James Shapiro
#68. What we have now, shall never be again. The poets of the past sit in amazement of the wanna-be's of an era long gone.
T. Grassan
#69. Actually, my first literary heroes were the Romantic poets, so I began to get serious by writing poems. I have notebooks full of them that I cherish but am afraid to look at.
John Dufresne
#70. Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.
William Carlos Williams
#71. What's the use of writing poetry for your peers? I don't think I should sell my poetry to other poets. If that's who my audience is, I'm dead, I'm not going to make any money.
Harley King
#72. A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through to the big time and become failed novelists.
Gary Reilly
#73. poetry. i am not writing it.
(make way for me please)
it is my skin. dripping with light.
Sanober Khan
#74. I take a real interest in the possibilities of teaching - including the practice of bringing creative writing, and serious reading, into the classroom. I am persuaded that since language is alive, much of the challenge has already been met by the poets and novelists we read.
Michael Cadnum
#75. 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.
Kate DiCamillo
#76. For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.
Teju Cole
#77. 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.
Fabrizio De Andre
#78. Poets and writers don't live either for money or for fame. And even without any recognition for their work they keep on writing!
Avijeet Das
#79. If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.
Annie Dillard
#80. Every writer should know their target. Aim for the heart ~ hit that and all which follows is sheer ecstasy.
Muse
#81. Some poets write pages upon pages because their hearts have a song to sing and their melodies cannot be contained in a single stanza... and I find myself typing out a quote because my soul is still gasping for breath, and all the words form a single sentence: I miss us.
Alfa H
#82. I grew up around poets and novelists and my dad wrote poems about everything - from a cat sleeping in a window to a car wreck he passed on the highway. I learned not to censor myself: that was one of things I learned in my apprenticeship, my creative-writing apprenticeship with my dad.
Lucinda Williams
#83. There's always some reason not to be writing and I regret the times I give in to that, because then writing feels strange - I feel like I have to reinvent the wheel. There are poets who don't have to do that.
Joan Larkin
#84. For poets that have had my luck,
Seldom write when they can kiss.
Alex Comfort
#85. That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them
George Bernard Shaw
#86. When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#87. The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.
W. H. Auden
#88. The grocery store poets do everything they can to encourage us in our willing suspension of disbelief.
Michael Pollan
#89. Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
Robert Morgan
#91. 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
#92. There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.
Ernest Hemingway,
#93. New arts are long in the world before poets describe them; for they borrow everything from their predecessors, and commonly derive very little from nature or from life.
Samuel Johnson
#94. Traveling down a road of self-destruction
With no room for any reconstruction
Jessica-Lynn Barbour
#95. some words
bring warmth
just by
being
next to each other.
Sanober Khan
#96. CEMETERY, n. An isolated suburban spot where mourners match lies, poets write at a target and stone-cutters spell for a wager.
Ambrose Bierce
#97. Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
Julian Barnes
#98. You hid in my ink and guided my hand. You stained the pages with your silence as God wrote the words, "Be still." Yet, my heart's blindness could only write in loud hues of red, "I love you.
Shannon L. Alder
#99. I think that the dark side of MFA programs is that they're generating more poets than the culture can absorb and there are more people writing poetry than possibly read it or can certainly earn a living around it.
Edward Hirsch
#100. There is some reason to believe that when a man does not write his poetry it escapes by other vents through him, instead of the one vent of writing; clings to his form and manners, whilst poets have often nothing poetical about them except their verses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
