Poet Quotes - Page 3

• If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

  David Carradine

  Inspirational, Life, Being Yourself

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

  Emily Dickinson

  Taken, Writing, Poetry

  Quoted in Martha Bianchi, Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924)

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• Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.

  Robert Frost

  Fire, Ice, Poetry

  "Fire and Ice" l. 1 (1923)

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• Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Beautiful, Mirrors, Poetry

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1840). “A defence of poetry. Essay on the literature, arts, and manners of the Athenians. Preface to the Banquet of Plato. The banquet”, p.33

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• We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

  William Butler Yeats

  Poetry, Argument, Quarrels

  "Anima Hominis" (1924)

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• Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.

  Robert Frost

  Art, Philosophy, Writing

  Collected Poems (1939) "Figure a Poem Makes"

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• Carpe diem. (Seize the day.)

  Horace

  Movie, Wise, Latin

  Horace, Jeffrey H. Kaimowitz (2008). “The Odes of Horace”, p.27, JHU Press

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• We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.

  Robin Williams

  Cute, Writing, Carpe Diem

  "Fictional character: John Keating". "Dead Poets Society", www.imdb.com. 1989.

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• Law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

  Tom Schulman

  Carpe Diem, Dead Poets Society, Engineering

  "Dead Poets Society". www.imdb.com. 1989.

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• The woods are lovely, dark, and deep but I have promises to keep...

  Robert Frost

  Tattoo, Running, Taken

  "Stopping byWoods on a Snowy Evening" l. 13 (1923)

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• The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body and reduce it to harmony.

  Francis Bacon

  Science, Men, Medicine

  Francis Bacon (1859). “The Works”, p.371

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• Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

  Carl Sandburg

  Poetry, Barriers, Syllables

  Carl Sandburg (2003). “The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg”, p.318, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Thinking, Poetry, Literature

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• A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

  E. B. White

  Beauty, Doe, Veils

  1942 One Man's Meat, 'Poetr y'.

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• Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
  Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
  Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
  And summer's lease hath all too short a date . . .

  William Shakespeare

  Summer, Art, Wind

  Sonnet 18

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• Romantic Art: The Hearts Awakening - Bouguereau At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.

  Plato

  Love, Valentines Day, Art

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• Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Moving, Inspiration, Writing

  A Defence of Poetry (written 1821) See Auden 22; Auden 39; Andrew Fletcher 1; Samuel Johnson 22; Twain 104

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• Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

  Robert Frost

  Poetry, Emotion, Found

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• You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

  John Ciardi

  Inspirational, Sarcastic, Children

  1962 In the Saturday Review, Fall issue.

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• Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.

  Zelda Fitzgerald

  Love, Inspirational, Positive

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• Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

  John Keats

  Inspirational, Reading Poetry, Remembrance

  Letter to John Taylor, 27 February 1818, in H. E. Rollins (ed.) 'The Letters of John Keats' (1958) vol. 1, p. 238

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• Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.

  Bruce Lee

  Love, Life, Friendship

  Bruce Lee (2015). “Bruce Lee: Artist of Life”, p.96, Tuttle Publishing

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• Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

  Don Marquis

  Education, Learning, Knowledge

  Don Marquis, William McCollum (1982). “Selected letters of Don Marquis”, Northwoods Pr

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• Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

  Carl Sandburg

  Rainbow, Poetry, Going Away

  Carl Sandburg (2015). “Harvest Poems: 1910-1960”, p.77, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I am a Woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal Woman, that's me.

  Maya Angelou

  Inspirational, Motivational, Inspiring

  "Phenomenal Woman" l. 6 (1978)

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