Poet Quotes
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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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Romantic Art: The Hearts Awakening - Bouguereau At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.
Plato
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Every poet hopes that after-times Shall set some value on his votive lay.
Caroline Norton
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I look at you and you look at me and deep in our hearts know it That you weren't much of a muse, but then I weren't much of a poet...
Nick Cave
The Birthday Party
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Terror itself, when once grown transcendental, becomes a kind of courage; as frost sufficiently intense, according to the poet Milton, will burn.
Thomas Carlyle
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The poet I saw once...
but whose words have long been
in my mind, windows of invincible candles..
Nathalie Handal
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O heart, be at peace, because
Nor knave nor dolt can break
What's not for their applause,
Being for a woman's sake.
William Butler Yeats
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The Poet, gentle creature as he is, Hath, like the Lover, his unruly times; His fits when he is neither sick nor well, Though no distress be near him but his own Unmanageable thoughts.
William Wordsworth
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But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with color nicely flung.
Vita Sackville-West
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The events in America now have the quality of things you would find out about long after the fact, and think: if only we had known. Well, we do know now. But what are we doing? Maybe a poet like Lowell brought America a little nearer to its boiling point.
Dan Chiasson
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I prefer poems that occupy an imaginative sphere. When I lived in Cincinnati, I was occasionally referred to as an "Ohio Poet;" this made me uneasy, not only because I think of myself as a generally American poet but also because I like to think I write out of the country of my own mind.
Cate Marvin
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With everyone born human, a poet - an artist - is born, who dies young and who is survived by an adult.
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
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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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Truth is far and flat, and fancy is fiery; and truth is cold, and people feel the cold, and they may wrap themselves against it in fancies that are fiery, but they should not call them facts; and, generally, poets do not; they are shrewd, they feel the cold, too, but they know a hawk from a handsaw, a fact from a fancy, as none knows better.
Stevie Smith
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The poet Amanda Nadelberg puts it nicely in an interview when she says "often what I listen for in poems is a sense that the writer is a little lost, not deliberately withholding information or turning on the heavy mystery machines, but honestly confounded - by the world? isn't it so? - and letting others listen in on that figuring." That's what engages me - the mind in motion, the drama of someone in the process of thinking - and it's the elusive mystery of those movements that I hope to capture in my essays.
Charles D'Ambrosio
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It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind.
William Congreve
