Poet Quotes
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They best can judge a poet's worth, Who oft themselves have known The pangs of a poetic birth By labours of their own.
William Cowper
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I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
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Of course, a psychologist would find it more direct to study the inspired poet. He would make concrete studies of inspiration in individual geniuses. But for all that, would he experience the phenomena of inspiration? His human documentation gathered from inspired poets could hardly be related, except from the exterior, in an ideal of objective observations. Comparison of inspired poets would soon make us lose sight of inspiration.
Gaston Bachelard
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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.
Yasiin Bey
Black Star
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There are still many writers out in the Bay, extraordinary writers like Gina Valdez, a poet who I just saw in Portland. We have young people like Eduardo Corral, who won the Yale Younger Poets Award. José Antonio Rodriguez, published by Luis Rodriguez. But there are only a few of us who are paid attention to in New York. There are legions behind us who are not.
Sandra Cisneros
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When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre. I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet. Or the comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations.
Sandra Cisneros
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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.
Marge Piercy
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For the poet is a light winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer with him. When he has not attained this state he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles.
Plato
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poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of the world we carry within us.
Vernon Lee
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The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill.
J. D. McClatchy
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Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.
W. H. Auden
