Mary Shelley Quotes

I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.

I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry.

If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved.

I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die.

Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.

My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.

I grew up around poets and novelists and my dad wrote poems about everything - from a cat sleeping in a window to a car wreck he passed on the highway. I learned not to censor myself: that was one of things I learned in my apprenticeship, my creative-writing apprenticeship with my dad.

O for ten years, that I may overwhelm / Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed / That my own soul has to itself decreed.

Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem.

For poets (bear the word) Half-poets even, are still whole democrats.

Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.

I am not a painter. I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

I wanted to be a poet. I had a really romantic idea about what that would mean. My parents knew some poets, and I liked how they dressed and acted, but I didn't really acknowledge that I only liked reading some bits of poetry while I was peeing or something.

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.

Writing poetry is a state of free float.

Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music.

Read from some humbler poet, Whose songs gushed from his heart, As showers from the clouds of summer, Or tears from the eyelids start.

One day, I will be a poet. Water will depend on my visions.

All of my movies are about how I wish the world would work. I've made very few movies about how the world worked. I could name them on one and a half hands, about how my movies have been very reflective of how the world was exactly. A lot of my movies are really about the way I wish the world was, and that's what this whole art form is all about. It's an interpretive art form.

[To become a poet] The most important thing is to pay attention. The next would probably be to read; it's so important to pay attention. It keeps you from being bored, and I might add it keeps you from being boorish.

If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.