Poet Quotes
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Cynie Cory roams the outer reaches of the heart’s territory, from the snowy winter of family life to the tropical jungles of love. She wears her heart on her sleeve and it is as big as the country she writes about. Is she the quintessential American girl? You bet she is, part Annie Oakley, part Emily Dickinson – harpshooting poet of wild nights. She zooms in on the detritus of love – the broken fragments, the fallen leaves – and puts together a collage that is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful. Watch out – she’s driving down your street.
Barbara Hamby
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The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said "A civilization is judged only in its decline." That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.
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The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
T. S. Eliot
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To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.
Lucille Clifton
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We're all getting older. We should, the three of us, be playing these songs because, hey, the end is always near. Morrison was a poet, and above all, a poet wants his words heard.
Ray Manzarek
The Doors
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There are poets who believe that you shouldn't engage at all in any cause. And there's something to be said for that. Because you don't want to - I think most political poetry is very bad. And it's very bad because you know too much to start with. You have a sense that you're right, and you're trying to tell other people what's right. And I think that's always kind of fundamentalism, and I don't like it.
W. S. Merwin
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The violinist is that peculiarly human phenomenon distilled to a rare potency - half tiger, half poet.
Yehudi Menuhin
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I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.
Michael Faraday
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A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
Samuel McChord Crothers
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I'm not a poet. I wish I was a poet but I'm not. I'm a playwright. And so I have a different set of antecedents.
Tony Kushner
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Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.
Oscar Wilde
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POET If not in a place, where are the People weeping? LIBERAL They creep weeping in the face, not place. POET Is it something with which we may cope The weeping, the creeping, the peepee-ing, the peeping?
Allen Tate
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I come from a short fiction background, and my mom is a poet, so I've always read poetry; I've always had a lot of different influences both linguistically and musically.
Lorde
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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. Auden
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A poet is an unhappy creature whose heart is tortured by deepest suffering but whose lips are so formed that when his sighs and cries stream out over them, their sound beomes like the sound of beautiful music . . . . And men flock about the poet saying, Sing for us soon again; that is to say, may new sufferings torture your soul, and may your lips continue to be formed as before.
Soren Kierkegaard
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It must be added that from his first words the foreigner made a repellent impression on the poet, but Berlioz rather liked him - that is, not liked but . . . how to put it . . . was interested, or whatever.
Mikhail Bulgakov
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I shall try to write a poem that is about the moment but doesn't betray things that are true to me as a poet.
Andrew Motion
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The poet is he who fights on the passionate Side and whoever loses he wins; when he Is defeated it is hard to say who wins...
Allen Tate
