Poet Quotes
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I think humor is a very serious thing. I use it as a way of weakening the reader's defenses so that I can more easily take him to something more.
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Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.
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Threadbare his songs seem now, to lettered ken: They were worn threadbare next the hearts of men.
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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.
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The light that never was, on sea or land; The consecration, and the Poet's dream.
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I'm a poet. I distrust anything that starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop because people don't think in full, clear sentences.
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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.
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Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.
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Don't ask a poet to explain himself. He cannot.
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The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.
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The real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas.
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What are we singers but the silver-voiced messengers of the poet and the musician?
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I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
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I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.
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In the streets the children screamed. The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed
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I'm afraid I take ... this rather clinical view of love: it's saving you from madness. I'm not so enthusiastic as other poets have been.
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A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner; nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people.
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Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.
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My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.
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The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.
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The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.
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God, eldest of Poets.
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There were a hundred booksellers in the old round city founded by the eighth-century caliph al-Mansur. The café and wine-drinking culture of Baghdad has been famous for centuries; there was a whole school of Iraqi poets who wrote poems about the wine bars of medieval Baghdad - the khamriyaat, or wine songs, that I quote in the book.
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I have kind of an almost religious feeling about poets. I usually refuse to meet them because I admire them so much. Except for Poe.
