"A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep."
— Salman Rushdie

"What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.'"
— Søren Kierkegaard (Either - Or)

"Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so--go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry--without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Transtromer broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco:



We got dressed and showed the house

You live well the visitor said

The slum must be inside you.



If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry first. For it is my confirmed bias that the poets remain the most 'stunned by existence,' the most determined to redeem the world in words...
"
— C.D. Wright (Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil)

"I act as the tongue of you,
... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened."
— Walt Whitman

"If you have time to chatter,
Read books.

If you have time to read,
Walk into mountain, desert and ocean.

If you have time to walk,
Sing songs and dance.

If you have time to dance,
Sit quietly, you happy, lucky idiot."
— Nanao Sakaki

"I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers."
— Sylvia Plath

"Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"When you read, don't just consider what the author thinks, consider what you think"
— Tom Schulman (Dead Poets Society: The Screenplay)

"It's the first thing I tell my students: If you could understand, really understand, that no one needs to read your work, then your writing would improve vastly by the time we meet in this classroom again."
— Dan Barden

"Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime.


"
— Andrew Marvell

"The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire.
He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none. A language must be found…of the soul, for the soul and will include everything: perfumes, sounds colors, thought grappling with thought"
— Arthur Rimbaud

"Oh what a poet I will flay myself into."
— Sylvia Plath

"...if you do not even understand what words say,
how can you expect to pass judgement
on what words conceal?"
— H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (Trilogy)

"Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content."
— Paul Valéry

""The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.""
— James Baldwin

"Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn--that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness--that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling."
— Jane Austen

"That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse."
— N.H. Kleinbaum (Dead Poets Society)

"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."
— André Breton

"On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree"
— W.S. Merwin

"Poetry makes nothing happen."
— W.H. Auden

"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."
— Gustave Flaubert (Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour)

"Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets."
— George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss)

"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."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets."
— Dudley Moore

"Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings — stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again."
— Greg Bear

"You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way."
— William Carlos Williams (I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet)

"Them lady poets must not marry, pal."
— John Berryman (The Dream Songs)

"Poets are interested primarily in death and commas. "
— Carolyn Kizer

"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"
— William Gass

"Still, no one finally knows what a poet is supposed either to be or to do. Especially in this country, one takes on the job—because all that one does in America is considered a "job"—with no clear sense as to what is required or where one will ultimately be led. In that respect, it is as particular an instance of a "calling" as one might point to. For years I've kept in mind, "Many are called but few are chosen." Even so "called," there were no assurances that one would be answered."
— Robert Creeley

"Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"Them lady poets must not marry, pal . . . It is a true error to marry with poets / or to be by them."
— John Berryman (The Dream Songs)

"From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist."
— Wallace Stevens (The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play)

"A pear should come to the table popped with juice,
Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms
Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist."
— Wallace Stevens (The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play)

"Poetry is a finikin thing of air
That lives uncertainly and not for long
Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs."
— Wallace Stevens (The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play)

"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."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job"
— Seamus Heaney

"Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a lady’s album – and this is always a gallant thing to do, whatever you may say."
— Gustave Flaubert (November: Fragments in a Nondescript Style)

"A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child."
— H.L. Mencken

"Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;"
— Wallace Stevens (The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play)

"We say God and the imagination are one . . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark."
— Wallace Stevens (The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play)

"...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?"
— HD