Poet Quotes
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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
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How do you define a poet? It's very simple. Anyone declaring that he is a poet, is a poet.
Billy Cannon
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The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.
William Shakespeare
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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
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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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Being a poet is not a job or a profession but a way of life.
Kathleen Raine
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A poet, to whom no one cruel or imposing listens,
Disdained by senates, whispers to your dust.
Carolyn Kizer
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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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Anybody who instantly goes from being a poet and a graduate student to being a public figure has to be in a state of shock. First people want to praise you, and then they want to attack you. No one can prepare you for it.
Erica Jong
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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
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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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I thought of rhyme alone,
For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble
And make the daylight sweet once more.
William Butler Yeats
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With Ameen Rihani the matter is diametrically opposite to Alois Musil's Arabian Desert, in purpose, in point of view and, above all, in personal psychology... I have considerable admiration for Mr. Rihani as a writer, an authentic poet and a philosopher.
William Seabrook
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She was not a poet. She was a poem.
Deborah Levy
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Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
Alfred de Musset
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There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.
Vladimir Nabokov
