Poetic Struggle Quotes

The more congenial page of some tenth-rate poeticule worn out with failure after failure and now squat in his hole like the tailless fox, he is curled up to snarl and whimper beneath the inaccessible vine of song.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?

I dreamt that I could paint you with words, but there were no colors bright enough, black or white enough, blue or green enough...they didn't mean enough

Writing songs is kind of like a wrestling match to me. You have to pin it down and make it do what you want it to do.

Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.

I am increasingly attracted to restricting possibility in the poem by inflicting a form upon yourself. Once you impose some formal pattern on yourself, then the poem is pushing back. I think good poems are often the result of that kind of wrestling with the form.

a poet never feels useful.

They best can judge a poet's worth, Who oft themselves have known The pangs of a poetic birth By labours of their own.

It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.

The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.

Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.

That was my way of putting it-not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings.

And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.

But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer "poetry" would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.

Formerly I believed books were made like this: a poet came, lightly opened his lips, and the inspired fool burst into song – if you please! But it seems, before they can launch a song, poets must tramp for days with callused feet, and the sluggish fish of the imagination flounders softly in the slush of the heart. And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth of loves and nightingales, the tongueless street merely writhes for lack of something to shout or say

While the poet wrestles with the horses on his brain and the sculptor wounds his eyes on the hard spark of alabaster, the dancer battles the air around her, air that threatens at any moment to destroy her harmony or to open huge open empty spaces where her rhythm will be annihilated.

Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet.

According to them, the poet is confined to the provinces with his mouth broken on his own syllabic trapeze.

Bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage, an early success or the ability to do anything well.

The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered.

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.