Poet Quotes - Page 3

• If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

  Emily Dickinson

  Taken, Writing, Poetry

  Quoted in Martha Bianchi, Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924)

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

  William Butler Yeats

  Poetry, Argument, Quarrels

  "Anima Hominis" (1924)

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Beautiful, Mirrors, Poetry

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1840). “A defence of poetry. Essay on the literature, arts, and manners of the Athenians. Preface to the Banquet of Plato. The banquet”, p.33

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Carpe diem. (Seize the day.)

  Horace

  Movie, Wise, Latin

  Horace, Jeffrey H. Kaimowitz (2008). “The Odes of Horace”, p.27, JHU Press

  92 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

  David Carradine

  Inspirational, Life, Being Yourself

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  63 Copy quote

  Show source

• Law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

  Tom Schulman

  Carpe Diem, Dead Poets Society, Engineering

  "Dead Poets Society". www.imdb.com. 1989.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• God is the perfect poet.

  Robert Browning

  Godly, Perfect, Poetry

  'Paracelsus' (1835) pt. 2, l. 648

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.

  Robin Williams

  Cute, Writing, Carpe Diem

  "Fictional character: John Keating". "Dead Poets Society", www.imdb.com. 1989.

  26 Copy quote

  Show source

• Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.

  Robert Frost

  Fire, Ice, Poetry

  "Fire and Ice" l. 1 (1923)

  30 Copy quote

  Show source

• Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.

  Robert Frost

  Art, Philosophy, Writing

  Collected Poems (1939) "Figure a Poem Makes"

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

  Carl Sandburg

  Poetry, Barriers, Syllables

  Carl Sandburg (2003). “The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg”, p.318, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The woods are lovely, dark, and deep but I have promises to keep...

  Robert Frost

  Tattoo, Running, Taken

  "Stopping byWoods on a Snowy Evening" l. 13 (1923)

  63 Copy quote

  Show source

• Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Thinking, Poetry, Literature

  9 Copy quote

• A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

  E. B. White

  Beauty, Doe, Veils

  1942 One Man's Meat, 'Poetr y'.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
  Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
  Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
  And summer's lease hath all too short a date . . .

  William Shakespeare

  Summer, Art, Wind

  Sonnet 18

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Romantic Art: The Hearts Awakening - Bouguereau At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.

  Plato

  Love, Valentines Day, Art

  21 Copy quote

• Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Moving, Inspiration, Writing

  A Defence of Poetry (written 1821) See Auden 22; Auden 39; Andrew Fletcher 1; Samuel Johnson 22; Twain 104

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

  Robert Frost

  Poetry, Emotion, Found

  112 Copy quote

• A life without love is like a tree without fruit.

  Stephen King

  Love, Famous Love, Inspirational Love

  Stephen King (2014). “Doctor Sleep”, p.452, Simon and Schuster

  184 Copy quote

  Show source

• A poem begins with a lump in the throat

  Robert Frost

  Inspirational, Writing, Poetry

  Robert Frost, Mark Richardson (2007). “The Collected Prose of Robert Frost”, p.84, Harvard University Press

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

  Carl Sandburg

  Life, Animal, Air

  11 Copy quote

• Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

  Carl Sandburg

  Rainbow, Poetry, Going Away

  Carl Sandburg (2015). “Harvest Poems: 1910-1960”, p.77, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.

  Bruce Lee

  Love, Life, Friendship

  Bruce Lee (2015). “Bruce Lee: Artist of Life”, p.96, Tuttle Publishing

  148 Copy quote

  Show source

• I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.

  Kenneth Rexroth

  Book, Son, Poetry

  34 Copy quote

• Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.

  Paul Engle

  Reading Poetry, Language And Power, Ordinary

  New York Times, February 17, 1957.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source