Poetry Quotes

I can make the earth stop in its tracks. I made the blue cars go away. I can make myself invisible or small. I can become gigantic & reach the farthest things. I can change the course of nature. I can place myself anywhere in space or time. I can summon the dead. I can perceive events on other worlds, in my deepest inner mind, & in the minds of others. I can I am.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.

A poem is a naked person . . . Some people say that I am a poet.

You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.

At certain times I read a lot of poetry. My favorite poets are Shelley and Keats. Rimbaud is so identifiable. Lord Byron. I don't know. Lately if I read poems, it's like I can always hear the guitar. Even with Shakespeare's sonnets I can hear a melody because it's all broken up into timed phrases so I hear it. I always keep thinking, 'What kind of song would this be?'

Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can't sing, I call a poem.

And every one of them words rang true and glowed like burnin' coal. Pourin' off of every page, like it was written in my soul from me to you.

You need something to open up a new door, to show you something you seen before but overlooked a hundred times or more.

All kids draw and write poetry and everything, and some of us last until we're about eighteen, but most drop off at about twelve when some guy comes up and says, "You're no good." That's all we get told all our lives. "You haven't got the ability. You're a cobbler." It happened to all of us, but if somebody had told me all my life, "Yeah, you're a great artist," I would have been a more secure person.

Life songs of ages, throbbing in my blood, have danced the rhythm of the tide and flood.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week.

The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Only parts of us will ever touch only parts of others.

I read poetry to save time.

The social revolution...cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all superstitions concerning the past.

I sit at my window gazing The world passes by, nods to me And is gone.

I have spent many days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung.

Not hammer-strokes, but dance of the water, sings the pebbles into perfection.