Rupert Brooke Quotes

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.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I'm enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.

I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.

I really love poetry. I'm a big E.E. Cummings fan and a big Walt Whitman fan, and I have a big book of poetry.

I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.

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

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.

I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.

Writing poetry is a state of free float.

It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.

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.

Even if you're a poet sitting in your room writing a poem, you're still in the world - although I guess being a poet is a different than having to deal with 40 or 50 people to raise a couple million bucks and all that bullshit.

If I begin writing a poem that means I'm intrigued in some way by whatever it's about and that if I'm not trying to find something new and pushing the envelope in the poem I can't expect my reader to be particularly excited about it either.

And what I've found over time is that for me to write a poem that I think is worthy that I can live with, two things have to happen.

Anyone who says, “Here’s my address, write me a poem,” deserves something in reply. So I’ll tell you a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

Writing poetry is the only form of literary labour which gives me entire satisfaction.

Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it

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.

If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry

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.

A day which passed without a poem from my pen I considered lost and misused.

whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.