Inspiring Quotes from Poets "I really don't think life is about the I-could-have-beens. Life is only about the I-tried-to-do. I don't mind the failure but I can't imagine that I'd forgive myself if I didn't try." — Nikki Giovanni
"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words." — Robert Frost
“The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.” — Maya Angelou
"Without imagination we can go nowhere." — Rita Dove
"A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights." — Charles Simic
"Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry." — Muriel Rukeyser
Rita Dove
Inspiring Quotes by Poets - 2
"I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge." — Gwendolyn Brooks
"Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing. — Donald Hall
“As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
"A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him." — Stanley Kunitz
"And by the way, everything in life is writeable if you have the outgoing guts to do it. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." — Sylvia Plath
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” — T.S. Eliot
Sylvia Plath
Inspiring Quotes by Poets - 3
"When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself..." — Stanley Kunitz
"We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained." — Nikki Giovanni
"I wish someone had told me that my stories are really mine to tell. In other words, anything that I think is important or that has moved me has the ability to move somebody else." — Rita Dove
"...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic." — Ted Hughes
"Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard." — Anne Sexton
Ted Hughes
Inspiring Quotes by Poets - 4
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” — Emily Dickinson
“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” — Robert Frost
"A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated and it nourishes you when you need it." — Rita Dove
"I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes." — Gwendolyn Brooks
“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.” — W.H. Auden
"I feel that anything is possible in a poem." — Mark Strand
Mark Strand
Inspiring Quotes by Poets - 5
"Poetry is life distilled." — Gwendolyn Brooks
“Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing - I suppose that's what a vocation means - at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction.” — Robert Lowell
"I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day." — Rita Dove
"Poetry gave me back my voice." — Maya Angelou
"Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life." — Robert Hayden
"We must use what we have to invent what we desire." — Adrienne Rich
Gwendolyn Brooks
Inspiring Quotes by Poets - 6
"Through poetry, we can transform ourselves and change others as we sit around each other's poems like campfires for warmth and sustenance." — Kamilah Aisha Moon
"The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something." — Rita Dove
"I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering." — Robert Frost
"Each moment is a place you've never been." — Mark Strand
“You are who you choose to be." — Ted Hughes
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” — Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver
Inspiring Quotes by Poets - 7
"The poem is the device through which the ordinary world is seen in a new way - engaging, compelling, even beautiful." — Ted Kooser
"Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown." — Sharon Olds
"Write the poem only you can write. — Billy Collins
“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.” — T.S. Eliot
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