Quotes About Inspiration

Let your poem be kept nine years.

Poetry is a life-cherishing force.

To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, To raise the genius, and to mend the heart

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

Dream by making and make by dreaming.

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.

I have defined poetry as a 'passionate pursuit of the Real.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

When there's music in your soul, there's soul in your music.

Poems are difficult to silence.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping...I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Music is not my life. My life is music.

No poem ever bought a hamburger, or not too many.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the mathematics of the heart?

Why poetry, you ask? Because of life, I answer.

When I say 'God' it is poetry and not theology

I believe in solitude broken like bread by poetry.

How poetry comes to the poet is a mystery.

Truth is poetry; it is the grandest poetry.

Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.

I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.

To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour