Poet Quotes

Kiss me with rain on your eyelashes, come on, let us sway together, under the trees, and to hell with thunder.

Edwin Morgan (poet)
Edwin Morgan (poet)
A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.

This wind you hear is the birth of memory
when the moment hatches in time's womb
there will be no art talk, the only poem
you will hear will be the spearpoint pivoted
in the punctured marrow of the villain; the
timeless native son dancing like crazy to
the retrieved rhythms of desire
fading
in-
to
memory.

I was most incorrigibly devoted to versifying, and all my spouse's wholesome admonitions had no manner of effect on me; in short, I believe this scribbling itch is an incurable disease...

I battered the cordons around me
And cradled my wings on the breeze,
Then soared to the uttermost reaches
With rapture, with power, with ease!

The first few glasses of beer were a revelation; they flushed my veins with happiness; they washed away all cares and shyness and worries. I remember thinking to myself, If I could have two pints of beer every afternoon, life would be a great happiness.

One can fall in love as often as a tree grows leaves. It is perfectly natural but not free of guilt and complications, unless one takes oneself to be a leaf.

If only we could touch the things of this world at their center, if we could only hear tiny leaves of birch struggling toward April, then we would know.

A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in. For safe keeping.

You can't drive to the coastline. You can only drive so close to the white chalky cliff and then you have to get out and dive.

How happily, how happily, the flowers die away!
Oh! Could we but return to earth as easily as they.

Loaded with note cards for research papers that I was hopelessly behind on, I'd enter the Public Library only to end up wandering around lost, wasting the day.

In the under-wood and the over-wood there is murmur and trill this day, For every bird is in lyric mood, And the wind will have its way.

Clinton Scollard
Clinton Scollard
The Tarot embodies symbolical presentations of universal ideas, behind which lie all the implicits of the human mind, and it is in this sense that they contain secret doctrine, which is the realization by the few of truths embedded in the consciousness of all.

A. E. Waite
A. E. Waite
My poetry has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.

We are no more content to plod along the beaten paths - and so marriage must go the way of God.

Amy Levy
Amy Levy
The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject so incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers.

Alicia Ostriker
Alicia Ostriker
Don Carlos was one of those peaceful and indolent men who do not know how to do evil, nor to go to great lengths to do good.

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
Say, boys! if you give me just another whiskey I'll be glad, And I'll draw right here a picture of the face that drove me mad. Give me that piece of chalk with which you mark the baseball score, You shall see the lovely Madeleine upon the bar-room floor.

We have, each of us, nothing.
We will give it to each other.

Carolyn Forché
Carolyn Forché
Imagine your shadow burning off the page / As the dear world and the dead word disengage

Don Paterson
Don Paterson
A simile is like a pair of eyeglasses, one side sees this, one side sees that, the device brings them together.

George McWhirter
George McWhirter
His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,
His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.
The others throw to be comprehended. He Throws to be a moment misunderstood.

Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women, kitchen of love, bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy. Sometimes, the men, they come with keys, and sometimes the men, they come with hammers.

The planted seed consigned to common earth,
Disdains to moulder with the baser clay;
But rises up to meet the light of day,
Spreads all its leaves, and flowers, and tendrils forth;
And, bathed and ripened in the genial ray,
Pours out its perfume on the wandering gales,
Till in that fragrant breath its life exhales.

Anne Lynch Botta
Anne Lynch Botta