Charles Baudelaire Quotes

With no companion but the constant Muse, Who sought me when I needed her ah, when Did I not need her, solitary else?

Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.

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

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.

If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved.

The poets down here don't write nothin' at all, they just stand back and let it all be.

There's a certain pleasure in violating the strictures of your education. The trick is, if you're going to explore ideas in a poem, to be suspicious of ideas and suspicious of your own mind at the same time. It's often a matter of orchestration and pacing. Of shaping some kind of dialectic flow.

For any artistic person who creates imaginary people, the art is like inhabiting the life and mind of a seven-year-old child with imaginary friends and imaginary events and imaginary grace and imaginary tragedy. Within that alternate universe, the characters do have quite a bit of free will. I know it's happening in my mind and my mind alone, but they seem to have their own ability to shape their destinies. So I'm not shooting for anything. If the characters are vulnerable it's simply because they're very human.

I don't know if you actually get something out of writing poetry. I think poetry is an autonomous muse that decides to come and sit on your couch.

My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.

I like the varying rhythm of being a writer that you have a period of being in complete isolation where it's just you and the book and your screenplay and no-one can read it.

And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.

Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.

The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.

The most available example of how poetry works for a poet is yourself, and yet you'll probably be the last one to know exactly how you're serving the art and how the art is serving you.

I paint with my back to the world

I never find words right away. Poems for me always begin with images and rhythms, shapes, feelings, forms, dances in the back of my mind.

Writing poetry is a state of free float.

Painting is a state of being.

The subject of the poem usually dictates the rhythm or the rhyme and its form. Sometimes, when you finish the poem and you think the poem is finished, the poem says, "You're not finished with me yet," and you have to go back and revise, and you may have another poem altogether. It has its own life to live.

If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.

The question "From where does the poet get it?" addresses only the what, nobody learns anything about the how when asking that question.

If the poet spun for half an hour daily, his poetry would gain in richness.