Poet Quotes
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A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.
Jay-Z
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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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Black poet extraordinaire Langston Hughes provided a nuts-and-bolts blueprint in “Good Morning, Revolution,” 1934
Clara Fraser
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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.
Plato
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As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail.
Aristotle
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How do you define a poet? It's very simple. Anyone declaring that he is a poet, is a poet.
Billy Cannon
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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?
Plato
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There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture — that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.
William Kingdon Clifford
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Swiftly gliding in, blushing like a girl, a tall thin stripling held out both his hands; and although I could hardly believe as I looked at his flushed feminine, and artless face that it could be the Poet, I returned his warm pressure. After the ordinary greetings and courtesies he sat down and listened. I was silent from astonishment: was it possible that this mild-mannered beardless boy could be the veritable monster of the world?–ex-communicated by the Fathers of the Church, deprived of his civil rights by the fiat of a grim Lord Chancellor, discarded by every member of his family,and denounced by the rival sages of our literature as the founder of a Satanic school? I could not believe it; it must be a hoax.
Edward John Trelawny
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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.
Raymond Queneau
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I prefer poems that occupy an imaginative sphere. When I lived in Cincinnati, I was occasionally referred to as an "Ohio Poet;" this made me uneasy, not only because I think of myself as a generally American poet but also because I like to think I write out of the country of my own mind.
Cate Marvin
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Screamin' 'Carpe Diem!' until I'm a Dead Poet.
Jay-Z
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To be a poet is to have an appetite for a certain anxiety which, when tasted among the swirling sum of things existent or forfeit, causes, as the taste dies, joy.
Rene Char
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Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.
William Collins
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I really like accompanying. I like working with vocalists, I've worked with a lot of poets.
Z'EV
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We are all youthful barbarians, and only our new toys bring us excitement. That has been the sole purpose of our flights. This one flies higher, that one faster. But now we will make ourselves at home. We will forget the machine, the tool. It is no longer complex; it does what it is supposed to do, unnoticed. And through this tool we will find again the old nature, the nature of the gardener, the navigator, the poet.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
