Rollo May Quotes

The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.

Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.

A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness.

Poets arent very usefulBecause they aren't consumeful or produceful.

The man is either crazy or he is a poet.

Nearly all children have a feeling for rhythm in words, for the delicate pattern of nursery rhymes. Many adults have lost this feeling and, if they read verse at all, demand a far cruder music than that which they once appreciated.

Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.

I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else.

So many writers grew up in tortured isolation, in revolt against their families. I and my sister were in a house where writing was considered the worthiest thing you could try to do.

Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool, But you yourself may serve to show it, That every fool is not a poet.

A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.

My 'must-have' was poetry. From the first, life meant that to me. And, fortunately, poetry is not purchasable material, but an atmosphere in which every life may expand. I found it everywhere about me.

An amateur may not be an artist, though an artist should be an amateur.

Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.

I want to be a poet, from head to toe, living and dying by poetry.

To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.

The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.

The poets down here don't write nothin' at all, they just stand back and let it all be.

To me Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.

If a certain activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning work with them will act suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.

Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper.

For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating.