Arthur Rimbaud Quotes

The secret of poetry is cruelty.

To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration

For a man to become a poet (witness Petrarch and Dante), he must be in love, or miserable.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.

The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses

A great emotion is too selfish ; it takes into itself all the blood of the spirit, and the congestion leaves the hands too cold to write. Three sorts of emotion produce great poetry - strong but quick emotions, seized upon for art as soon as they have passed, but not before they have passed ; strong and deep emotions in their remembrance along time after ; and false emotions, that is to say, emotions felt in the intellect. Not insincerity, but a translated sincerity, is the basis of all art.

Poems, to me, do not come from ideas, they come from a series of images that you tuck away in the back of your brain. Little photographic snapshots. Then you get the major vision of the poem, which is like a giant magnet to which all these disparate little impressions fly and adhere, and there is the poem!

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

I do not suppose that anyone not a poet can realize the agony of creating a poem. Every nerve, even every muscle, seems strained to the breaking point. The poem will not be denied; to refuse to write it would be a greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-fish when the task is done.

The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.

Writing is a delicious agony.

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

Any artist, in any field, wants to press deeper, to discover further. Image and sound play are among the strongest colors available to poetry's palette. For a long time, I've wanted to invite in more strangeness, more freedom of imagination. Yet music, seeing, and meaning are also cohering disciplines. They can be stretched, and that is part of poetry's helium pleasure. But not to the point of breaking.

Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.

Those same forces that drive a genius to create the things or ideas that entertain or enlighten us often gobble so much of his personality that he has none left for the social graces.

I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.

The spark of true poetry flashes when ideas are juxtaposed that no one has yet thought of bringing together.

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.