Poet Quotes
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When the poet died his cat was put to death and mummified.
Petrarch
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And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is a woman's whole existence.
Virginia Woolf
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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?
Charles Dickens
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The adoption of the required attitude of mind towards ideas that seem to emerge "of their own free will" and the abandonment of the critical function that is normally in operation against them seem to be hard of achievement for some people. The "involuntary thoughts" are liable to release a most violent resistance, which seeks to prevent their emergence. If we may trust that great poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, however, poetic creation must demand an exactly similar attitude.
Sigmund Freud
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A poet is a good citizen turned inside out.
William Butler Yeats
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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
William Butler Yeats
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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.
William Butler Yeats
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My biggest poetic influences are probably 20th-century British and Irish poets. So I suppose I'm always listening for the music I associate with that poetry, the telling images, the brevity. I want to hear it in my own work as well as in the poetry I read. However, I think I'm generally more forgiving of other poets than myself.
David Starkey
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There are some situations which men understand by instinct, by which reason is powerless to explain; in such cases the greatest poet is he who gives utterance to the most natural and vehement outburst of sorrow. Those who hear the bitter cry are as much impressed as if they listened to an entire poem, and when th sufferer is sincere they are right in regarding his outburst as sublime.
Alexandre Dumas
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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.
Sandra Cisneros
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Have big dreams but focus only on what you can control: your own thoughts, words and actions. This was Gandhi's way ... in the words of Buddhist poet Gary Snyder, our job is to move the world a millionth of an inch.
Eboo Patel
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I was a poet too; but modern taste
Is so refined and delicate and chaste,
That verse, whatever fire the fancy warms,
Without a creamy smoothness has no charms.
Thus, all success depending on an ear,
And thinking I might purchase it too dear,
If sentiment were sacrific'd to sound,
And truth cut short to make a period round,
I judg'd a man of sense could scarce do worse
Than caper in the morris-dance of verse.
William Cowper
