10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Muriel Rukeyser

“No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down–impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book”.

“All the poems of our lives are not yet made.”

“Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.”

“I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot.”

“The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.”

“The truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.”

“The ‘idea’ for the poem, which may come as an image thrown against memory, as a sound of words that sets off a traveling of sound and meaning, as a curve of emotion (a form) plotted by certain crises of events or image or sound, or as a title which evokes a sense of inner relations; this is the first ‘surfacing’ of the poem. Then a period of stillness may follow.”

“If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.”

“The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.”

“Slowly I would get to pen and paper, make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, brave, setting up signals across vast distances, considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.”

— Muriel Rukeyser