Poet Quotes
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The government of the United States, under Lyndon Johnson, proposes to concern itself over the quality of American life. And this is something very new in the political theory of free nations. The quality of life has heretofore depended on the quality of the human beings who gave tone to that life, and they were its priests and its poets, not its bureaucrats.
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Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house
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He saw wan Woman toil with famished eyes; He saw her bound, and strove to sing her free. He saw her fall'n; and wrote "The Bridge of Sighs"; And on it crossed to immortality.
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Jim wanted to be known as a poet, first and foremost.
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Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
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Modern poets are bells of lead. They should tinkle melodiously but usually they just klunk.
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Sometimes, when I am tired of so many oscillations, I look for refuge in a word which I begin to love for itself. Resting in the heart of words, seeing clearly into the cell of a word, feeling that the word is the seed of a life, a growing dawn... The poet Vandercammen says all that in a line: "A word can be a dawn and even a sure shelter."
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Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.
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Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.
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For a man to become a poet, he must be in love, or miserable.
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Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.
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He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
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I am a great admirer of Robert Vavra and love his beautiful photographs and books. He is a wonderful artist, a poet...
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while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
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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.
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Every poet has a certain amount of "stuff." That's what you draw from for imagery. The more stuff you know well, not simply intellectually but sensually, emotionally, intimately, the wider the pool from which you draw.
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The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.
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I'm inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I'm good at it.
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“A mathematician who is not also something of a poet will never be a complete mathematician.”
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Inspiration is inbreathing, indwelling, poetry can never be entirely willed. It may be true a poet is given only a single line but that line is a gift from the unconscious, intution, a perception.
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One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination. The Divine Vision.
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The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
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Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill.
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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?
