#poet

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. ↗

You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved, who were lost from the start, I don't even know what songs would please you. I have given up trying to recognize you in the surging wave of the next moment. All the immense images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and un- suspected turns in the path, and those powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods-- all rise within me to mean you, who forever elude me. You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house-- , and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,-- you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening... ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#life

Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea. ↗

— T.S. Eliot

#vision

The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none. A language must be found…of the soul, for the soul and will include everything: perfumes, sounds colors, thought grappling with thought ↗

— Arthur Rimbaud

#poets #vision

Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means. ↗

— Billy Collins

#authority

When you read, don't just consider what the author thinks, consider what you think ↗

— Tom Schulman

#john-keating #tom-schulman #authority

Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color. ↗

— W.S. Merwin

#loneliness #loss #poetry #influence

My turn shall also come: I sense the spreading of a wing. ↗

— Osip Mandelstam

#poetry #growth

The new world is as yet behind the veil of destiny In my eyes, however its dawn has been unveiled ↗