Poet Quotes
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What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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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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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It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score.
Hector Hugh Munro
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The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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To live within limits. To want one thing. Or a few things very much and love them dearly. Cling to them, survey them from every angle. Become one with them - that is what makes the poet, the artist, the human being.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing.
Teju Cole
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The passionate heart of the poet is whirled into folly and vice.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
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Some men are one thing on the surface and another underneath. The true poet shows not just the exterior of his subject, but all the contradictions within, and lets the reader draw his own conclusions.
Steven Saylor
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The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.
William Butler Yeats
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Let the poet dream his dreams. Yet, the poet must look at the world; must enter into other men's lives; must look at the earth and the sky, must examine the dust in the street; must walk through the world and his mirror.
William Baziotes
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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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Because poets feel what we're afraid to feel, venture where we're reluctant to go, we learn from their journeys without taking the same dramatic risks.
Diane Ackerman
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As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.
Charles Baxter
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He was a poet -oh all men are when they're in love.
Eric Gamalinda
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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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A poet not in love is out at sea; He must have a lay-figure.
Philip James Bailey
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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
