Poet Quotes
-
A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.
-
In particular I may mention Sophocles the poet, who was once asked in my presence, How do you feel about love, Sophocles? are you still capable of it? to which he replied, Hush! if you please: to my great delight I have escaped from it, and feel as if I had escaped from a frantic and savage master. I thought then, as I do now, that he spoke wisely. For unquestionably old age brings us profound repose and freedom from this and other passions.
-
God, eldest of Poets.
-
For the rhapsode ought to interpret the mind of the poet to his hearers, but how can he interpret him well unless he knows what he means?
-
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.
-
A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.
-
The deity on purpose [sings] the liveliest of all lyrics through the most miserable poet.
-
A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.
-
“It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician.”
-
My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.
-
As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.
-
The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.
-
Poets, like whores, are only hated by each other.
-
Screamin' 'Carpe Diem!' until I'm a Dead Poet.
-
If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.
-
I'm obviously not orthodox, I don't know how many real poets have ever been orthodox.
-
The spirit of the poet craves spectators... even if only buffaloes.
-
The light that never was, on sea or land; The consecration, and the Poet's dream.
-
The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
-
I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what's really on my mind.
-
Turn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but a poet; for a poet is worse, more servile, timorous and fawning than any I have named.
-
A lot of artists use memories. A lot of prose writers, a lot of poets, a lot of songwriters, refer back to something. Generally it's all you've got, unless you're brilliant and can write totally in the now.
-
Those things which make the infernal regions terrible, the darkness, the prison, the river of flaming fire, the judgment seat, are all a fable, with which the poets amuse themselves, and by them agitate us with vain terrors.
-
The poet is never inspired, because he is the master of that which appears to others as inspiration. He does not wait for inspiration to fall out of the heavens like roasted ortolans. He knows how to hunt...He is never inspired because he is unceasingly inspired, because the powers of poetry are always at his disposition, subjected to his will, submissive to his own activity.
