Poet Quotes
-
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
-
Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?
-
In most men there exists a poet who died young, whom the man survived.
-
Poets can tell the truth as they see it. It’s the author’s story, the author’s voice.
-
A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well.
-
Every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum ) and can never recur. That nothing shd. be old or borrowed however cannot be.
-
The poet lights the light and fades away. But the light goes on and on.
-
Where are the leaders?' Sapphique asked. 'In the fortresses,' the swan replied. 'And the poets?' 'Lost in dreams of other worlds.' 'And the craftsmen?' 'Forging machines to challenge the darkness.' 'And the Wise, who made the world?' The swan lowered its black neck sadly. 'Dwindled to crones and sorcerers in towers.
-
Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.
-
It therefore should be possible for even the photographer - just as for the creative poet or painter - to use the object as a stepping stone to a realm of meaning completely beyond itself.
-
I think Lindsay Kemp really introduced me to the work of Jean Genet, and through that, I kind of kept re-educating myself about other prose writers and poets.
-
Just as a poet often has license from the rules of grammar and pronunciation, we should like to ask for 'physicists' license from the rules of mathematics in order to express what we wish to say in as simple a manner as possible.
-
Honor is the greatest poet.
-
Memory exercised in a particular way is a natural gift of poetic genius. The poet above all else, is a person who never forgets certain sense impressions which he has experienced and which he can relive again as though with all their original freshness.
-
I was strong and tough enough and charming. / How else is a fat Jew lesbian poet gonna get by? / Listening to the radio, staying home, staying alone, like / they mean us to. / Who means you to be left out? / Who don't?
-
Happy indeed the poet of whom, like Orpheus, nothing is known but an immortal name! Happy next, perhaps, the poet of whom, like Homer, nothing is known but the immortal works. The more the merely human part of the poet remains a mystery, the more willing is the reverence given to his divine mission.
-
He was a poet -oh all men are when they're in love.
-
A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.
-
The passionate heart of the poet is whirled into folly and vice.
-
Campion is a poet who knows that what a poet sees is nothing without a mixture of formal prowess and emotional insight.
-
If I were poet now, I would not resist the temptation to trace my life back through the delicate shadows of my childhood to the precious and sheltered sources of my earliest memories. But these possessions are far too dear and sacred for the person I now am to spoil for myself. All there is to say of my childhood is that it was good and happy. I was given the freedom to discover my own inclinations and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength.
-
A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so.
-
I got a head full of headaches, a heart that's full of woes. I'm constantly singin' them down home blues, and not many people knows That leaves me with a twisted view of the whole wide world as I know it... And I guess I got no choice but to be a poet.
-
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.
