Poet Quotes
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I prefer poems that occupy an imaginative sphere. When I lived in Cincinnati, I was occasionally referred to as an "Ohio Poet;" this made me uneasy, not only because I think of myself as a generally American poet but also because I like to think I write out of the country of my own mind.
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To be a poet is to have an appetite for a certain anxiety which, when tasted among the swirling sum of things existent or forfeit, causes, as the taste dies, joy.
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Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.
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All things can tempt me from this craft of verse: One time it was a woman's face, or worse-- The seeming needs of my fool-driven land; Now nothing but comes readier to the hand Than this accustomed toil.
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Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?
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I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay
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Always in a foreign country, the poet uses poetry as an interpreter.
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I don't pretend to understand him, but I can enjoy him as a poet and comedian. I liked the idea of the eternal return. Sometimes I think that being on tour year after year is an eternal return; you play a certain club in Copenhagen and then ten years later you are back again, traveling the same roads year after year.
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I remember I was very taken with a book called DreamTigers by Jorge Luis Borges. He was at the University of Texas, Austin, and they collected some of his writings and put them in a little collection. It's called DreamTigers in English, but it doesn't exist in Spanish. It's a little sampler. But that collection in English is what struck me, because in there he has his poems, and I was a poet as well as a fiction writer.
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Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.
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For a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him.
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You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.
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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.
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I have felt at times with groups of children that I was really being what every poet would like to be - a bard in the old sense.
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I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what's really on my mind.
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The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
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Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn-that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness-that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.
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Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life?
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I was born with the devil in me,' Holmes wrote. 'I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.
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Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief.
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A poet is a good citizen turned inside out.
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The nature of rumor is well known to all. It was your own poet who said: 'Rumor, an evil surpassing all evils in speed.'
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The events in America now have the quality of things you would find out about long after the fact, and think: if only we had known. Well, we do know now. But what are we doing? Maybe a poet like Lowell brought America a little nearer to its boiling point.
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A dreamer of the common dreams, A fisher in familiar streams, He chased the transitory gleams That all pursue; But on his lips the eternal themes Again were new.
