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...

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

Authority forgets a dying king

Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously...

Great poets are great copy editors.

Christ did not ask or want to be what he was not.

Universe is the Sun watching its own self.

It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that...

I pen you words from my heartneither paper nor pen would doas I lay them out in flowery fontswhat more could you ask foras I am writing in your heartthe love that I want to...

With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a...

Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.

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

no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.

I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the metier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim...

some words bring warmthjust bybeing next to each other.

One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.

A writer will divine a metaphor from a pattern on a dress, or a gesture, because sunsets have been done before.

When following God, Zero we never find.

From whichever side I start, I think I am in an old place where others have been before me.

Wherever there is somebody else, a war is not far away.

When the long bygone Lee Po wanted to say something, he could do it with only a few words.

Miltons were, on the whole, the most enthusiastic poet followers. A flick through the London telephone directory would yield about four thousand John Miltons, two thousand William Blakes, a thousand or so Samuel Colleridges, five...

Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we’re not poets.

Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem’s power is as an instrument of...

For the way of the comets is the poet’s way.

. . . poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry’s social value.

Children picking up our bonesWill never know that these were onceAs quick as foxes on the hill;

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

let me diefrom having being drunk onindigo skies, my liver…overflowing with stars.

Between roars the lion purrs.

the next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.

Two forces create eternity – a fairy tale and a dream from the fairy tale.

Whatever others may say, they say it to deceive and comfort themselves, not help you.

In the lie of truth lies the truth.

Absolute is a game with only one player where Absolute forgets itself so it would have a reason to fulfill the motion while returning.

One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.

Okay, other than poets.

The poet’s task is to give every echo a voice.

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

It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing – otherwise everything and everyone would be speaking once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to...

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret suffrings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. People...

i writebecauseit is the only wayi can reach you.

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

Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.

SELFBENEATH THE SURFACE,VEILED ON PURPOSE,ALL KNOWING AND GRAND,DIRECTED, GUIDED, BY THE ETERNAL HAND,SUSTAINED, FULFILLED, FULL OF LIGHT,REALIZATION ACHIEVED, BY WILLFUL MIGHT.

For a moment at least, be a smile on someone else’s face.

Disease often comes with a smiling face.

We built tall buildings, but we have not become any taller.

Poets take themselves very seriously.

Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.