Poet Quotes

The loves that meet in Paradise shall cast out fear, And Paradise hath room for you and me and all.

Christina Rossetti
Christina Rossetti
I seem to lose words like another person loses blood. Everyday, every day there's something gone. It leaks everywhere.

J. Bernlef
J. Bernlef
I, a Laconian dog, can bite again: Yes, I can make the Daunian tiger flee, Much more a bragging, foul-mouth'd whelp like thee.

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

Don Paterson
Don Paterson
My poetry has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.

Little brown boy,
Slim, dark, big-eyed,
Crooning love songs to your banjo
Down at the Lafayette—Gee, boy, I love the way you hold your head,
High sort of and a bit to one side,
Like a prince, a jazz prince.

If I told you about a land of love...would you swallow it as a remedy?

He gets at the substance of a book directly; he tears out the heart of it.
Of Samuel Johnson

Rain knows the earth and loves it well, for rain is the passion of the earth.

Love is the answer, that everyone seeks...Love is the language, that every heart speaks.

I loved thee once. I'll love no more,
Thine be the grief, as is the blame;
Thou art not what thou wast before,
What reason I should be the same?

It is easy to be humble when a greater is preferred; but when an inferior is lifted high above our heads, how can we bear it?

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

Oft as by chance, a little while apart The pall of empty, loveless hours withdrawn, Sweet Beauty, opening on the impoverished heart, Beams like a jewel on the breast of dawn.

My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns;
Love is the fire and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals;
The metal in this furnace wrought are men's defiled souls.

Robert Southwell
Robert Southwell
Languages are not owned
by nations but by the people who use them
and make them live.

Abdourahman Waberi
Abdourahman Waberi
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.

When I recall that at the fourth hour
of the night, watched by shining stars,
LOVE at last became incarnate,
the memory is horror.

Frank Bidart
Frank Bidart
Yet this is the watch by night.
Let us all accept new strength, and
real tenderness. And at dawn, armed
with glowing patience, we will enter
the cities of glory.

Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud
I'm saying that the domain of poetry includes both oral & written forms, that poetry goes back to a pre-literate situation & would survive a post-literate situation, that human speech is a near-endless source of poetic forms, that there has always been more oral than written poetry, & that we can no longer pretend to a knowledge of poetry if we deny its oral dimension.

By the power of eloquence old truth receives a new habit; though its essence be the same, yet its visage is so altered that it may currently pass and be accepted as a novelty.

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.

And look upon you with ten thousand eyes
Till heaven wax'd blind, and till the world were done.

Joshua Sylvester
Joshua Sylvester
Even
After
All this time
The Sun never says to the Earth, "You owe me." Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.

Let the person who wins be him who says what is most desirable for the city.