The life we’re given is on a thread, so wear it well.

Shelley’s servant”. Wasn’t that a wonderful gesture of humility by someonewho was such a great poet himself? And later, Bharatiyar had his own dasan, the poet Subburathinam, who tookthe pen name Bharathidasan. Subburathinam’s poetry inspired yet another poet who wrote as Surada, short for Subburathina-dasan. And to think this long chain of inspiration spans centuries,...

Poets are the sense, philosophers­­ the intelligence­­ of humanity.

We say God and the imagination are one . . .How high that highest candle lights the dark.

My girl was mad and I loved her. Upon a night, she read my poetry; and kissing me madly she cried, ‘You are a genius, my love!’ To which I replied, ‘My girl,’ whispering, ‘Every doctor in this land with a prescription pad is more of a genius than I.

Poetry makes nothing happen.

A poet is a musician that can’t sing. Words have to find a man’s mind before they can touch his heart, and some men’s minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly no matter how small or stubborn the mind of the man who listens.

It is as if the soul of the continent is weeping. Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the buffalo. It weeps for magic that has been forgotten. It weeps for the decline of poets.It weepsfor the black people who think like white people.It weepsfor the Indians who think like settlers.It weepsfor...

There is no moral to my song,I praise no right, I blame no wrong;I tell of things that I have seen,I show the man that I have beenAs simply as a poet canWho knows himself poet and man.

An owl sound wandered along the road with me.I didn’t hear it–I breathed it into my ears.

Keep a journal, and don’t assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.

This dream the world is having about itselfincludes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,a groove in the grass my father showed us allone day while meadowlarks were trying to tellsomething better about to happen.

Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour.

There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either

You were the poem I never knew how to write because no words could describe the wind you cannot see, but feel.

But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.

Nor is there wanting in the pressSome spirit to stand simply forth,Heroic in it nakedness,Against the uttermost of earth.The tale of earth’s unhonored thingsSounds nobler there than ‘neath the sun;And the mind whirls and the heart sings,And a shout greets the daring one.

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own,...

poetry. i am not writing it.(make way for me please)it is my skin. dripping with light.

funny how our heartswere designed to loveso fiercely.but break ever so gently.

I live there…where the birds are infiniteeverywherewhere they fleeit’s a place your eyes can wanderbut never seeWhere everyone accepts me,Without any pretenseIt’s a place your mind can picturebut never really comprehend.

Whatever you get out of poetry – take it. take it. take it. Words are better off felt than understood.

I wish to stay drenchedforeverin those rain-blue eyesin those…soul-reaching crystalsnot moving a musclenor breathingjustsavoringthis turquoise acheagainst my heart.

It is kind of ridiculous that a poet is expected to live in the real world.

your smile.is the ultimategolden dream.all the poemsin the worldare waking up from.

To fall in love with someone’s thoughts – the most intimate, splendid romance.

i have laughedmore than daffodilsand cried more than June.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

All good poems are victories over something.

We are all poets, really.

I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn’t say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.

If the poets offered us nothing more than another make-believe world, they would be mere sellers of drugs or, at best, sweetmeats.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

If you were destined to be a poet, then you won’t brainstorm for lines that rhymes. If you were destined to be a celebrity, then you shouldn’t start searching for fans. If you are truly a god, then let others worship you!

As long as music survives, poetry will never die.

99% of natural poets discovered their talents through love letters.

The eclipses ofpoets are not foretold in the calender.

By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and...

What was it Like?””What was what like?” he said, although he knew.”Quick, I imagine. But you must have perceived something. A split second of vanishing awareness. A grasping at a shrinking light.” “It was like being fucked in the brain.

I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well...

Cities are built out of poet’s dreams.

The poet’s job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.

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.

I write to forget the days that broke me into a million nights.

I recall that now and I recall everything for what do we have but the past to parent us?

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

There are two types of poets: People who write poetically about their lives, and poets that live poetically and write about it.

A women’s heart beat is very rapid; it jumps from love to hate, in seconds when in silence there is surely madness.

The poet must be more useful than any other member if his tribe.