May Sarton Quotes

Writing is primarily a sensuous and creative expression of life.

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.

For me, poetry was... the fastest way to express what I was feeling, what I was going through.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

I didn't know until high school that I was interested in writing in any real way. But there was this boy that I had a crush on, and I used to tell him all the time what I felt about him. Finally he gave me a blank journal and said to write it all down - and it didn't take me very long to realize how much I loved writing.

I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.

Writing dark poetry was always my escape.

I wasn't quite used to writing a diary - I didn't understand why people did it - but I wrote down notes and they went into a poem.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

Poets, when they write of love, give themselves and everyone else away!

A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.

Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.

I am writing these poems from inside a lion.

Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.

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 would keep in mind to a young poet that you are entering into something that is very important, that has always been important in terms of human concerns.

I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

Prose is walking; poetry is flying

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.

I'd like to rid myself of writing, to surrender, to release the venom. And hopefully at some point, I'll be a happy, well-adjusted guy and I'll have no need for all that 'art.'

I keep all my poems in my journals and lock them away. They are the start of everything.