My sudden, unforeseen capitulation had knocked me backward, and I had nothing to hold on to. My internal weather was eerily calm, as if in a tornado’s aftermath, birdsong, sunshine, supersaturated colors, wreckage all around,...

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

… Coexisting with the radiant masculinity of Apollonian Keats is a lunar poet of enchanted night in thrall to the goddess Hecate.

All good poems are victories over something.

when i write of you, my deari am holding youin the most exquisiteways.

But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost’s poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not...

If you want poets in space, you’ll have to wait.

There are many secrets; don’t try to resolve them all.

This dwarf still observes the world from his own self-imposed height.

How does one say something new and not retell?

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

Traps!” he said. “Never in the world! Don’t think it! Why, Gower is just a necessary olf bore. Nobody’s supposed to know much about him–except instructors and their hapless students.

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...

Maybe you could be mine / or maybe we’ll be entwined / aimless in this sexless foreplay.

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

My job as a poet, is not to succumb to despair but to find in words, an antidote for the emptiness of existence.

Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.

i would rather havefeelings without wordsthan words without feelings.

There is no single thing… that is so cut and dried that one cannot attend to its secret whisper which says ‘I am more than just my appearance’. If each object quivers with readiness to...

The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire.He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back...

Even if you are alone you wage war with yourself.

If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.

Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?

If you could have walked on the planet before humans lived here, maybe the Ivory Coast would have seemed more beautiful than La Côte d’Azur.

The world is a fairy tale; we are its guardians.

Good or bad, positive or negative, there is no comment more insulting to a poet than one displaying that you have not properly read and considered the things they wrote.

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...

All poets are religious poets.

Saturated Arrogance…imprisoned musescried to be freeshe took away their quillsand saiddo not bother me…

Always write exactly what you’re feeling at the exact moment when writing something like poetry or an emotional novel. Put yourself, pour all emotions into your work…make yourself cry, feel joy if you are writing...

Poets are the sense, philosophers­­ the intelligence­­ of humanity.

..i spill intothe kind of silenceonly Khalil Gibran would understand.

Protesters are still on the fringes like satellites, revolving around the system. But prophets and poets lead us into a new world, beyond simply yelling at the old one.

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

Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.

To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into...

There are no winners in real games.

Get close to grass and you’ll see a star.

Everything and nothing are the same in the Absolute.

I used to know Brian Howard well — a dazzling young man to my innocent eyes. In later life he became very dangerous — constantly attacking people with his fists in public places — so...

Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.

He would write and write. He would make wonderful things happen. Some of it would be true. All of it would be true. Most of it would be true.

A poet has to be a bit childlike at heart, and in that sense all the romantic stereotypes about poets being “eternal children”, etc, are all accurate. They believe, whatever they may say, that art...

I suppose I’m saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries by truth and by his...

Tis the wink of an eye, ’tis the draught of a breath,From the blossom of health to the paleness of death,From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud-Oh! why should the spirit of...

This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet’s destiny is to love.

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.

Before the first before and after the last after, there is night waiting.

We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards.