Poet Quotes
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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.
William Jay Smith -
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.
Rene Char
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Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
C. S. Lewis -
Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word "myth" only for stories we ourselves cannot believe.
Adam Kirsch -
There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.
Ernest Hemingway -
Some moralist or mythological poet Compares the solitary soul to a swan; I am satisfied with that, Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it, Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.
William Butler Yeats -
Men and women who are lonely create. Those who are gregarious rarely do... Any poet would rather bed with a girl than write a poem about her. All art is the result of frustration. Art is energy deflected from its normal course in action.
Burton Rascoe -
The all importance of clothes has sprung up in the intellect of the dandy without effort, like an instinct of genius; he is inspired with clothes, a poet of clothes.
Thomas Carlyle
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Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.
Gaston Bachelard -
There is a pleasure in poetic pains / Which only poets know.
William Cowper -
Wrrite, wrrite, Lapochka, why you don’t wrrite?” and assure me that a horse, even with four legs, stumbles. I found it difficult to explain to her what I was writing. “It’s about Colley Cibber,” I said. “He was an actor, playwright and poet.” “Also poet?” Varya asked suspiciously. “Who he? Pushkin?”
Bel Kaufman -
A scientist with a poet's command of language, Cristina Eisenberg writes with precision and passion . . . takes her reader on a breathtaking, sometimes heartbreaking tour of the planet from the Gulf of Maine to the Amazonian rain forests, the tropical coral reefs to old growth forests of the Northwest as well as rivers, lakes, and wetlands. I found the wealth of information not only accessible but riveting . . . Eisenberg's powerful, beautifully written book . . . has the potential to open many people's eyes, minds, and hearts.
Elizabeth Cunningham -
No place is a place until it has found its poet.
Wallace Stegner -
A poet, to whom no one cruel or imposing listens, Disdained by senates, whispers to your dust.
Carolyn Kizer
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I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.
Erica Jong -
Black poet extraordinaire Langston Hughes provided a nuts-and-bolts blueprint in “Good Morning, Revolution,” 1934
Clara Fraser -
Being a poet is not a job or a profession but a way of life.
Kathleen Raine -
[To become a poet] The most important thing is to pay attention. The next would probably be to read; it's so important to pay attention. It keeps you from being bored, and I might add it keeps you from being boorish.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr. -
The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.
William Blake -
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.
William Watson
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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.
Erik Larson -
We are chained hand and foot by protocol, enslaved to a static, empty world where men and women can’t read, where the scientific advances of the ages are the preserve of the rich, where artists and poets are doomed to endless repetitions and sterile reworking of past masterpieces. Nothing is new. New does not exist. Nothing changes, nothing grows, evolves, develops. Time has stopped. Progress is forbidden
Catherine Fisher -
Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.
William E. Gladstone -
But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with color nicely flung.
Vita Sackville-West