Poet Quotes
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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.
Rene Char
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Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.
William Wycherley
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What a comfort to know that God is a poet.
Rachel Grace Held
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For me the journey of making a film is a journey of discovery as to what that film is. I mean what I do is what other artists do, painters, novelists, people that make music, poets, sculptors, you name it. It's about starting out and working with the material and discovering through making, working with the material the artifact.
Mike Leigh
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And, of all lies (be that one poet's boast) / The lie that flatters I abhor the most.
William Cowper
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To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.
Martin Heidegger
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As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail.
Aristotle
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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
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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
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It was not the purpose of poetry to record anything and everything, to merely describe either the outer world or some subjective mood, but to speak from the imagination of the poet to the imagination of the reader.
Kathleen Raine
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We are all youthful barbarians, and only our new toys bring us excitement. That has been the sole purpose of our flights. This one flies higher, that one faster. But now we will make ourselves at home. We will forget the machine, the tool. It is no longer complex; it does what it is supposed to do, unnoticed. And through this tool we will find again the old nature, the nature of the gardener, the navigator, the poet.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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All the poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets must be truthful.
Wilfred Owen
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There's not a big range in the political poetry of the last year, or not a political range. On the one hand, no poet that I know of who writes in English in the United States is anything but a humanist. So all poets, including myself, seem to be under that umbrella. We just don't have Rush Limbaugh poets, Ann Coulter poets.
David Biespiel
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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
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The question "From where does the poet get it?" addresses only the what, nobody learns anything about the how when asking that question.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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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.
Plato
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Tell me", he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how to speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depth of the sea instead?
Virginia Woolf
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I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems.
Robert Frost
