Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Poetry isn't an activity, it's a way life is lived.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely.

Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.

Rather than numbing or drowning out the difficult-to-describe but urgently sensed feelings that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate thought and strange impulse.

Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.

Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did.

When I started to take literature and poetry classes, I just started to get inspired by these new incredible works of art that I had never seen or heard of before. I wrote a lot of bad high-school poetry, just like pretty much everyone did, I think, at some point. For me, the inspiration never really stopped.

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.

Take my verses too serious ya hate me, cause I'm the one to paint a vivid picture, no HD.

Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

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

Poetry has an indirect way of hinting at things. Poetry is feminine. Prose is masculine. Prose, the very structure of it, is logical; poetry is basically illogical. Prose has to be clear-cut; poetry has to be vague - that's its beauty, its quality. Prose simply says what it says; poetry says many things. Prose is needed in the day-to-day world, in the marketplace. But whenever something of the heart has to be said, prose is always found inadequate - one has to fall back to poetry.

Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play.

You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.

Poetry is enthusiasm with wings of fire; it is the angel of high thoughts, that inspires us with the power of sacrifice.

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world

I learn life from the poets.

Before you go further, let me tell you what a poem brings, first, you must know the secret, there is no poem to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries.

I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.

To be a poet is as serious, long-term and natural as the effort to be the best human you can be. To express something well is not a question of having a top-class education and understanding poetic forms: rather, it's a question of paying attention.