Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

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

for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration

I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem.

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

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

The subject of the poem usually dictates the rhythm or the rhyme and its form. Sometimes, when you finish the poem and you think the poem is finished, the poem says, "You're not finished with me yet," and you have to go back and revise, and you may have another poem altogether. It has its own life to live.

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.

All good verses are like impromptus made at leisure.

The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.

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.

Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator.

I can explain all the poems that were ever invented - and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.

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.

Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?

When poets go off the boil, they sound like bumble bees; when critics do, they sound like sewing machines.