Poetry Quotes - Page 7

Poets, like fighters, both reap the benefits of roadwork.

I will go to campus alone dressed in antique silk slips and beat-up cowboy boots and gypsy beads, and I will study poetry. I will sit on the edge of the fountain in the plaza and write.

Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.

There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!

Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.

Talent is a faucet. When it is on, one must write. Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.

And so I pray I am today as honest
with myself, with life all around me and below and above me,
with all who I encounter.

Still must the poet as of old,
In barren attic bleak and cold,
Starve, freeze, and fashion verses to
Such things as flowers and song and you;

Still as of old his being give
In Beauty's name, while she may live,
Beauty that may not die as long
As there are flowers and you and song.

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.

Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.

To write good poems is the secret of brevity.

Music resembles poetry, in each
Are nameless graces which no methods teach,
And which a master hand alone can reach.

The one who pulls the puppet strings knows fairytales can heal.

When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.

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.

It’s not easy to write a poem about a poem.

...prose unfolds in time; and time contains both obstacles and revelations. Prose develops, the way characters and situations do. It requires a flow. A poem is an instant, lightning across the sky. Prose is before the storm, the storm, after the storm.

My earliest poems appear almost skeletal to me now - it seems I've learned to add meat, muscle and a nice suit of clothes.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.