Best Poets Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

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

“We were never supposed to be in love; for everything that exists inside a heart eventually dies.”

“It is ferocious, life, but it must eat . . .”

“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 possession but at the same time, ineffably, it expresses the desire for possession, like a net that fishes by itself, a hook that is also the desire of the fish. To be a poet is to desire and, at the same time, to obtain, in the exact shape of the desire.”

“… the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder.”

“This dream the world is having about itself”

“I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred million men march in step in a parody of order.”

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

“I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job”

“August is dust here. Drought”

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

“A poem is a meteor.”

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

“Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.”

“Criticism is like politics: if you don't make your own you are by default accepting the status quo and are finally yourself responsible for whatever the status quo does to you.”

“Therefore, since the world has still”

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

“a silent night. - the most eloquent poem i have ever read.”

“We must listen to poets.”

“When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.”

“The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.”

“At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.”

“A pear should come to the table popped with juice,”

“Again I resume the long”

“When there's a moon the shadows in the house grow larger;”

“Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house”

“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, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.”

“depth and substance.”

“A single poem, alone”

“I am filled time and again”