Poet Quotes
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As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.
Edgar Allan Poe
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Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.
Elizabeth Janeway
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My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.
Seamus Heaney
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And when you are foolish enough to identify yourself as a poet, your interlocutors will often ask: A PUBLISHED Poet? And when you tell them that you are, indeed, a published poet, they seem at least vaguely impressed. Why is that? Its not like they or anybody they know reads poetry journals. And yet there is something deeply right, I think, about this knee-jerk appeal to publicity. It's as if to say: Everybody can write a poem, but has your poetry, the distillation of your innermost being, been found authentic and intelligible by others? Can it circulate among persons, make of its readership, however small, a People in that sense? This accounts for the otherwise bafflingly persistent association of Poetry and fame - baffling since no poets are famous among the general population. To demand proof of fame is to demand proof that your songs made it back intact from the dream in the stable to the social world of the fire, that your song is at once utterly specific to you and exemplary for others.
Ben Lerner
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Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.
Rene Char
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He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.
Tom Stoppard
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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.
Sandra Cisneros
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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.
Seneca the Younger
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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.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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“It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician.”
Karl Weierstrass
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The spirit of the poet craves spectators... even if only buffaloes.
Friedrich Nietzsche
