Quotes to inspire and reflect

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.

A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.

1 can understand your wanting to write poems, but I don’t quite know what you mean by “being a poet.”

The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions.

Poetry is a counterfeit creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

Poetry’s unnat’ral; no man ever talked poetry ’cept a beadle on boxin’ day.

To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.

Poetry does not necessarily have to be beautiful to stick in the depths of our memory, there to occupy most mischievously the place doomed to invasion by certain melodies which, however blameworthy, can never be expunged.

Would you be a poet / Before you’ve been to school? / Ah, well! I hardly thought you / So absolute a fool.

How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?

When you are describing / A shape, or sound, or tint; / Don’t state the matter plainly, / But put it in a hint; / And learn to look at all things / With a sort of mental squint.

I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides who would ever shave themselves in such a state?

Wise poets that wrapt Truth in tales, / Knew her themselves through all her veils.

Nothing so difficult as a beginning / In poesy, unless perhaps the end.

Who forgives the Senior’s ceaseless verse, / Whose hairs grow hoary as his rhymes grow worse?

The form of a poem is invisible. A poem is not an “object.” This is hard to accept in a mechanical age.

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

Poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its saying.

Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.

The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.

Poetry is a whim of Nature in her lighter moods; it requires nothing but its own madness and, lacking that, it becomes a soundless cymbal, a belfry without a bell.