Anne Sexton Quotes

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

There's something about the shape that a poem takes in my mind before I write it that has to do with suddenness.

I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

I've never experienced writer's block. When it's going really well, my body temperature goes up, and I'm flushed. I get quite delirious.

As a composer, every project begins with either a blank sequence or a blank manuscript and for the first couple of days you cover and experience every emotion under the sun. Fear being the main one.

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.

A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans.

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

For not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us.

Paul Valery speaks of the 'une ligne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself.

I don't know if you actually get something out of writing poetry. I think poetry is an autonomous muse that decides to come and sit on your couch.

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.

Your creativity is waiting for you like a dancing partner.

Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.

And Mandelstam says a poet - you go down to the shore and you see an unlikely looking from a bottle from the past, you open it. Mandelstam says, "It's okay to do so. I'm not reading someone else's mail. It was addressed to whoever found it. I found it, therefore it's addressed to me."

Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)

The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.

The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him.

My books happen. They tend to blast in from nowhere, seize me by the throat, and howl 'Write me! Write me now!' But they rarely stand still long enough for me to see what and who they are, before they hurtle away again. And so I spend a lot of time running after them, like a thrown rider after an escaped horse, saying 'Wait for me! Wait for me!' and waving my notebook in the air.

My theory is that poems are written because of a state of emotional irritation. It may be present for some time before the poet is conscious of what is tormenting him. The emotional irritation springs, probably, from subconscious combinations of partly forgotten thoughts and feelings. Coming together, like electrical currents in a thunder storm, they produce a poem. ... the poem is written to free the poet from an emotional burden.

Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song.

I've got a penny-ante talent, out of which I try to drum up a living for myself. And what nobody seems to realize is that it's just as difficult to get a bad idea as a good one.

Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.

Sure there are poets which did never dream Upon Parnassus, nor did taste the stream Of Helicon; we therefore may suppose Those made not poets, but the poets those.

Talking with other artists is an incredible process. You engage with the work very differently...a nd different relationships between different works start to emerge. To tap into that energy-to tap into that moment-is great for me as an exercise.