Quotes to inspire and reflect

Feeble verses are those which sin not against rules, but against genius.

Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.

Who can predict his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all hours, even when doctors sleep.

A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love.

The best poets, after all, exhibit only a tame and civil side of nature. They have not seen the west side of any mountain.

The poet is he that hath fat enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claw's all winter.

Color, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toenails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own.

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it.

Reading one's own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet’s tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain.

Families, like countries, take their prophets unkindly, but a verse-speaker in the house is dishonor to be hooted.

Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labour put into the creation of the poetry.

Not by wisdom do they [poets] make what they compose, but by a gift of nature and an inspiration similar to that of the diviners and the oracles:

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

Most wretched men / Are cradled into poetry by wrong. / They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.

Poets of course are even more unpredictable than other writers, overwhelmed as they are by the moment they inhabit and finding it difficult to connect yesterday with tomorrow.

Ne’er / Was flattery lost on poet’s ear; / A simple race! they waste their toil / For the vain tribute of a smile.

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

The void yields up nothing. You have to be a great poet to make it ring.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal [but] which the reader recognizes as his own.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

The poet begins where the man ends. The man’s lot is to live his human life, the poet’s to invent what is nonexistent.

Poetry is adolescence fermented and thus preserved.

The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk.

Prose—it might be speculated—is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard.

The world, in its sheer exuberance of kindness, will try to bury the poet with warm and lovely human trivialities. It will even ask him to autograph books.

The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality.

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

The poem is the dream made flesh, in a two-fold sense: as work of art, and as life, which is a work of art.

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

The arrogance of poets is only a defense; doubt gnaws the greatest among them; they need our testimony to escape despair.

The true poet is a friendly man. He takes to his arms even cold and inanimate things, and rejoices in his heart.

He who would be the tongue of this wide land / Must string his harp with chords of sturdy iron / And strike it with a toil-imbrowmed hand.

As to the pure mind all things are pure, so to the poetic mind all things are poetical.

Wh6n power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Literature is a state of culture, poetry a state of grace, before and after culture.

Poetry is like painting: one piece takes your fancy if you stand close to it, another if you keep at some distance.

A verse may find him who a sermon flies, / And turn delight into sacrifice.

It is not enough for poems to be fine; they must charm, and draw the mind of the listener at will.

Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace’s poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter’s religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature.

The poet is a bird of strange moods. He descends from his lofty domain to tarry among us, singing; if we do not honor him he will unfold his wings and fly back to his dwelling place.

A true sonnet goes eight lines and then takes a turn for better or worse and goes six or eight lines more.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

When a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him.

The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics.