Poet Quotes
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It is not easy to describe the present position of legal opinion on advertising and free speech. Only a poet can capture the essence of chaos.
Bill Vaughan
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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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It is surprising to see what superficial, inconsequential reasonings satisfy the most part of mankind. A piece of wit, a jest, a simile, or a quotation of an Author, passes for a mighty argument.... This weakness and effeminacy of mankind in being persuaded where they are delighted, have made them the sport of orators, poets, and men of wit.
John Arbuthnot
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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 would rather be a swineherd, understood by the swine, than a poet misunderstood by men.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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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The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.
William Carlos Williams
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When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.
Raymond Queneau
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The greatest poet who ever wrote about rowing is Virgil, the greatest historian is Thucydides, but the greatest imagination ever to turn its attention to the sport is that of painter, Thomas Eakins.
Barry S. Strauss
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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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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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Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
Thomas Carlyle
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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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The ancient Britons lived and breathed in poetry: the expression may seem extravagant, but it is not so in reality; for, in their political maxims, preserved to our own times, they place the poet-musician beside the agriculturist and the artist, as one of the three pillars of social existence.
Augustin Thierry
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If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.
William Butler Yeats
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Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned.
Dana Gioia
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To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.
Terence McKenna
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Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.
Paul Muldoon
