Henry David Thoreau Quotes

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.

To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.

Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books!

For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing.

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

Poetry is the morning dream of great minds.

Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I'm writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet in rest, which isn't the same thing at all. But I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one.

Poetry - poiesis means a thing made.

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.

Beauty makes one lose one's head. Poetry is born of this decapitation

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.

Writing is not chewing your nails and picking your teeth, but a matter of public interest.

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.

Poetry is what makes my toenails twinkle.

I was teaching myself notes from three and then by seven I'd figured out how to play some chords, and at school I used to love writing poems and poetry, so I guess I kind of put two and two together and that formed my songwriting from an early age.

It is poetry that changes everything.

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 poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences.

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.

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.