Poet Quotes
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I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original.
William Cowper -
Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the asronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.
Victor Hugo -
It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.
Sofia Kovalevskaya -
Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.
Natasha Trethewey -
I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.
Carl Rakosi -
I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.
Edmund Wilson -
I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.
Billy Collins
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Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.
Ernest Hemingway -
Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?
Carlos Drummond de Andrade -
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
Vladimir Nabokov -
To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.
Karl Jaspers -
But you have to understand that I consider myself a very modest artist, or whatever, and not of importance really at all - it is quite embarrassing to me to be asked my opinion about things. I am only a wee Scottish poet on the outside of everything.
Ian Hamilton Finlay -
One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
Umberto Eco
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It was among farmers and potato diggers and old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul.
Lady Gregory -
a poet is someone who is abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement. Which is to say the highest form of concentration possible: fascination; to report on the electrifying experience of being
e. e. cummings -
The antagonism between the poet and the politician has generally been evident in all cultures.
Salvatore Quasimodo -
Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.
Salman Rushdie -
If he had had no education, maybe Basho could have been a much greater poet.
Nanao Sakaki -
The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
Edith Sitwell
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To be a poet is to place pleasure, beauty and sensual delights front and centre, it means having a predilection for debauchery.
Nicole Brossard -
Ever been kidnapped by a poet if i were a poet i'd kidnap you put you in my phrases and meter.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr. -
Jesus of Nazareth was a poet, no less than a prophet, of pre-eminent genius.
Orson F. Whitney -
Children when they ask you why your mama so funny say she is a poet she don't have no sense
Lucille Clifton