Poet Quotes
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Nas' longevity comes from him having strong lyrical value in his songs, him being more like a poet and improving over time.
Ernest Dion Wilson
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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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I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems.
Robert Frost
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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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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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Swiftly gliding in, blushing like a girl, a tall thin stripling held out both his hands; and although I could hardly believe as I looked at his flushed feminine, and artless face that it could be the Poet, I returned his warm pressure. After the ordinary greetings and courtesies he sat down and listened. I was silent from astonishment: was it possible that this mild-mannered beardless boy could be the veritable monster of the world?–ex-communicated by the Fathers of the Church, deprived of his civil rights by the fiat of a grim Lord Chancellor, discarded by every member of his family,and denounced by the rival sages of our literature as the founder of a Satanic school? I could not believe it; it must be a hoax.
Edward John Trelawny
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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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The way to praise a poet is to write a poem.
Paul Engle
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Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.
William Ernest Henley
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As playwrights, as poets, we have to look to ourselves, listen to our guts for the final answers about what changes to make. Everyone has advice about how to end your play differently. And it's not about right or wrong. At the end of the day, it's your baby and you know what's best.
Stephen Karam
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All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.
Stevie Smith
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In some ways painters have been more important in my life than writers. Painters teach you how to see—a faculty that usually isn’t highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing.
Carolyn Kizer
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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.
William Watson
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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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Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.
William Wycherley
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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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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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Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper.
Miguel de Cervantes