Poet Quotes
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[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.
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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
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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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Let the poets cry themselves to sleep, and all their tearful words will turn back into steam.
Conor Oberst
Bright Eyes
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No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet.
Claude Monet
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The way to praise a poet is to write a poem.
Paul Engle
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A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.
Amal El-Mohtar
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The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.
William Shakespeare
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The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
William James
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A poet's mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy.
Isak Dinesen
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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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A poet, to whom no one cruel or imposing listens,
Disdained by senates, whispers to your dust.
Carolyn Kizer
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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
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For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.
Teju Cole
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Academia is a graveyard of poets.
Kathleen Raine
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I happen to believe that there are a lot of good poets around at present, but a poet like Alex Kuo, who possesses a highly developed moral sense and a bitter honesty, is rare at any time and especially in this time. We need him.
Carolyn Kizer
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From the throes of inspiration and the eddies of thought the poet may at last be able to arrive at, and convey the right admixture of words and meaning.
Eyvind Johnson
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The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.
Northrop Frye
