Poets Quotes
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The poets of each generation seldom sing a new song. They turn to themes men always have loved, and sing them in the mode of their times.
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Freedom is slavery some poets tell us. Enslave yourself to the right leader's truth, Christ's or Karl Marx', and it will set you free.
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There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.
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The poets are wrong of course. But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.
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Honor to the idealists, whether philosophers or poets. They have improved us by mingling with our daily pursuits great and transcendent conceptions. They have thrown around our sensual life the grandeur of a better, and drawn us up from contacts with the temporal and the selfish to communion with beauty and truth and goodness.
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One of the greatest Roman poets was Ovid, an older contemporary of Jesus (his dates: 43 BCE–17 CE). His most famous work is his fifteen-volume Metamorphoses, which celebrates changes or transformations described in ancient mythology. Sometimes these changes involve gods who take on human form in order to interact, for a time, with mortals.
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Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same - to bring people back from their present strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless, average, divine, original concrete.
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Love, according to our contemporary poets, is a privilege which two beings confer upon one another, whereby they may mutually cause one another much sorrow over absolutely nothing.
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Shakespeare is dangerous to young poets; they cannot but reproduce him, while they fancy that they produce themselves.
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Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness.
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To know how to say what others only know how to think is what makes men poets or sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformers-- or both.
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Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.
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Who can Perswade more Powerfully than Poets?
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Language may die at the hands of the schoolman: it is regenerated by the poets.
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Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making poets.
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My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
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Poets play with words to keep themselves sane.
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The poets are supposed to liberate the words – not chain them in phrases. Who told the poets they were supposed to think? Poets are meant to sing and to make words sing. Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? 'Your very own words,' indeed! And who are you?
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It's interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls.
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Poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.
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Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.
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But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.
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It seems that God took away the minds of poets that they might better express His.
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So many people, so few poets.
