live the poetry you cannot write

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul." ~Soren Kierkegaard

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
~Mark Strand

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either. ~Robert Graves

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. ~Percy Shelley


A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer.... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. ~E.B. White

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. ~Robert Frost

The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past. ~Robert Frost

You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick.... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in. ~Dylan Thomas

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. ~Pablo Neruda

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows. ~Edmund Burke

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. ~T.S. Eliot

Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young. ~Sainte-Beuve

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. ~Thomas Babington Macaulay

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out. ~Richard Rosen


Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. ~John Keats

I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.
Russell Baker




A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.

Rene Char

God is the perfect poet.

Robert Browning