Poetic Inspiration Quotes

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality.

Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.

Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There's always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I'd say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it's too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.

When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance.

What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon poet.

My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, and Henry Armstrong.

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.

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.

... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ... ... if you demand on one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

The Muse gave the Greeks genius and the art of the well-turned phrase.

I find I cannot exist without Poetry

One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination. The Divine Vision.

Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

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

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

Poetry comes fine-spun from a mind at peace.

If I wanted to be Rimbaud, what was I doing in graduate school? Trying to stay out of the army, of course. Graduate study gave me a draft deferment. But I also knew I lacked erudition and polish and was often sunk in forlorn reveries.

Writing a poem is discovering.

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

Defeat furnishes good material to the poets and the artists, but none of us care to have the glory of the conquered apply to us.

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

A great emotion is too selfish ; it takes into itself all the blood of the spirit, and the congestion leaves the hands too cold to write. Three sorts of emotion produce great poetry - strong but quick emotions, seized upon for art as soon as they have passed, but not before they have passed ; strong and deep emotions in their remembrance along time after ; and false emotions, that is to say, emotions felt in the intellect. Not insincerity, but a translated sincerity, is the basis of all art.