Poet Quotes

#1. You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It's only that. #Quote by Edna St. Vincent Millay

#2. Moonlight streamed in, sending loving beams over his face. He closed his eyes and basked in it, and I could tell it was calling to him, even though the moon was not full. She didn't speak to me, but Samuel had once described her song to me in the words of a poet. The expression of bliss on his face while he listened to her music made him beautiful. #Quote by Patricia Briggs

#3. You're speaking volumes, my friend, and tonight we're doing short poems only. #Quote by Andre Aciman

#4. You either a poet or a homosexual."

"Oh, shit, that's fucked up. Why can't I be both? #Quote by Paul Beatty

#5. The Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes wrote that beauty is fundamental. Well, with the poet's permission, so is courage. #Quote by Tina Brown

#6. This is what growing old is. We think we will learn sanskrit, learn Greek. Instead, what we learn is more than we ever wanted to learn about things we wish we'd never heard of. #Quote by Cynthia Zarin Poet Essayist

#7. No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. #Quote by T. S. Eliot

#8. It has been observed before that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's spirit. #Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#9. A poet stated it more succinctly when he wrote, "I hear and forget. I see and hear and I remember. However, when I see, hear and do, I understand and succeed." Interestingly enough, you will discover that when you read this book a second time, you will get more thoughts and more ideas than you did the first time. This is especially true if you read a few minutes every day before you start your day's activities and just before you go to sleep. #Quote by Zig Ziglar

#10. On Becoming a Poet in the 1950s"

There was love and there was trees.
Either you could stay inside and probe your emotions
or you could go outside and keenly observe nature.
Describe the sheen on carapaces,
the effect of breeze on grass.

What's the fag doing now? Dad would say.
Picking the nose of his heart?
Wanking off on a daffodil?

He's not homosexual, Mom would retort, using her apron as a potholder to
remove the apple brown betty from the oven.
He's sensitive. He cares.
He wishes to impart values and standards to an indifferent world.

Wow! said Dad, stomping off to the pantry for another scotch. Two poets in
the family. Ain't I a lucky duck?

As fate would have it, I became one of your tweedy English teachers, what
Dad would call a daffodil-wanker,
and Mom ended up doing needlepoint, seventy-two kneelers for St. Fred's
before she expired of the heart broken on the afternoon that Dad
roared off with the Hell's Angels.
We heard a little from Big Sur. A beard. Tattoos. A girlfriend named Strawberry.
A boyfriend named Thor.
Bars and pot and coffeehouses, stuff like that.

After years of quotation by younger poets, admiration but no real notice,
Dad is making the anthologies now.
Critics cite his primal rage, the way he nails Winnetka. #Quote by Stephen Beal

#11. Lancelot and Guenever were sitting at the solar window. An observer of the present day, who knew the Arthurian legend only from Tennyson and people of that sort, would have been startled to see that the famous lovers were past their prime. We, who have learned to base our interpretation of love on the conventional boy-and-girl romance of Romeo and Juliet, would be amazed if we could step back into the Middle Ages - when the poet of chivalry could write about Man that he had 'en ciel un dieu, par terre une deesse'. Lovers were not recruited then among the juveniles and adolescents: they were seasoned people, who knew what they were about. In those days people loved each other for their lives, without the conveniences of the divorce court and the psychiatrist. They had a God in heaven and a goddess on earth - and, since people who devote themselves to godesses must exercise some caution about the ones to whom they are devoted, they neither chose them by the passing standards of the flesh alone, nor abandoned it lightly when the bruckle thing began to fail. #Quote by T.H. White

#12. The end of spring- the poet is brooding about editors. #Quote by Yosa Buson

#13. Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means. #Quote by Heinrich Heine

#14. He [the poet] brings out the inner part of things and presents them to men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets themselves. #Quote by Hilaire Belloc

#15. I don't think that you can say by any stretch of the imagination that all Wisconsin or Brooklyn-based poets write in a particular way. Similar sensibilities can spring up next to each other in the flower bed, or across oceans. #Quote by Matthea Harvey

#16. I try to avoid calling myself a poet because I think that's something someone else has to call you. It's like bragging. #Quote by Dorianne Laux

#17. Bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage, an early success or the ability to do anything well. #Quote by Charles Bukowski

#18. Why are women so ungenerous to other women? Is it because we have been tokens for so long? Or is there a deeper animosity we owe it to ourselves to explore?
A publisher...couldn't understand why women were so loath to help each other.... The notion flitted through my mind that somehow, by helping..., I might be hurting my own chances for something or other -- what I did not know. If there was room for only one woman poet, another space would be filled....
If I still feel I am in competition with other women, how do less well-known women feel? Terrible, I have to assume.

I have had to train myself to pay as much attention to women at parties as to men.... I have had to force myself not to be dismissive of other women's creativity. We have been semi-slaves for so long (as Doris Lessing says) that we must cultivate freedom within ourselves. It doesn't come naturally. Not yet.
In her writing about the drama of childhood developments, Alice Miller has created, among other things, a theory of freedom. in order to embrace freedom, a child must be sufficiently nurtured, sufficiently loved. Security and abundance are the grounds for freedom. She shows how abusive child-rearing is communicated from one generation to the next and how fascism profits from generations of abused children. Women have been abused for centuries, so it should surprise no one that we are so good at abusing each other. Until we learn how to stop doing that, we cannot make our revoluti #Quote by Erica Jong

#19. All I want for my birthday is a date with my muse Christina Aguilera Is that too much for a guy to ask for? #Quote by Ocean Crisstopher Poet

#20. As anyone who has the slightest knowledge of my work knows, I have little in common with Larkin, who was tall, taciturn and thin-on-top, and unlike him I laugh, nay, sneer, in the face of death. I will concede one point: we are both lesbian poets. #Quote by Carol Ann Duffy

#21. Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty as his main end; the other Truth. #Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

#22. If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean, you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn't have to be a poem for heaven's sake. It may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings
excuse the expression. Like Manlius and Esposito and all those poor men. #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#23. If you know much about your work - why you work, how you work, your aims - you are probably not a poet. #Quote by Mary Webb

#24. Every day when I walk the streets of this city, I am just that. I am an Indochinese laborer, generalized and indiscriminate, easily spotted and readily identifiable all the same. It is this curious mixture of careless disregard and notoriety that makes me long to take my body into a busy Saigon marketplace and lose it in the crush. There, I tell myself, I was just a man, anonymous, and, at a passing glance, a student, a gardener, a poet, a chef, a prince, a porter, a doctor, a scholar. But in Vietnam, I tell myself, I was above all just a man. #Quote by Monique Truong

#25. And if other old men must be willing, at the end, to push up off their deathbed and adventure out into the unknown, how much more willing must that man be whose whole life has been just such a daily exercise of adventuring, even in the stillness of his own garden? I mean, the poet. #Quote by David Malouf

#26. i bring my kiasu friend to the airport
leavings are never easy, not for long
and though we both saw blur along the way
memories flooded present tensions.
in the curry of his life no lemak remained
so now the predictable exit signalled
the end of his roundings, his bombings–
he can bluff like hell, ma, he got style–
and left me thinking about home, my kampong. #Quote by Kirpal Singh

#27. And my friend Karen remembers
as a little girl
studying Hebrew she inquired
of her refugee tutor who stroked his beard
and said in Yiddish "if there is a god
or if there isn't a god
a Jew studies"
isn't that a good story
beloved, but the woman in me
says that the poet lies
the poet can afford to lie #Quote by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

#28. How does a tiny heart harbor so many clashing sentiments?
One moment it is devoted. The next, purely disdaining.
Weeping at tremendous heartache
and then laughing, lighthearted, through the same tears.
How can a heart rage so fierce as to boil blood while it turns to ice?

How is this done?

To love, hate, esteem, deride, rejoice, deplore, favor, resent -
all of these and more swirling inside.
This sensitive heart, so full and resilient, buoys up to the point of bursting
and then deflates on a dime; it is a slave to whims and whispers.
How is it that the human heart beats so wild and untamed? #Quote by Richelle E. Goodrich

#29. As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection. #Quote by Oscar Wilde

#30. This one is for our crew, but it's also for all the weird girls and word nerds, for all the in-the-middle wickeds and queers and misfits and hell-raisers. #Quote by Laura Goode

#31. The difference between poets and mystics ... The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it's true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting. #Quote by Neal Stephenson

#32. No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher. #Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#33. Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem. #Quote by Natasha Trethewey

#34. Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline ... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers. #Quote by Stephen Jay Gould

#35. In America they have to know just what you are
novelist, poet, playwright ... Well, I've been all of them ... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting. #Quote by Robert Penn Warren

#36. But Orlando was a woman - Lord Palmerston had just proved it. And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman's whole existence. And if we look for a moment at Orlando writing at her table, we must admit that never was there a woman more fitted for that calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle under the window - all of which is, of course, the very stuff of life and the only possible subject for fiction. Surely Orlando must have done one of these things? Alas, - a thousand times, alas, Orlando did none of them. Must it then be admitted that Orlando was one of those monsters of iniquity who do not love? She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love - as the male novelists define it - and who, after all, speak with greater authority? - has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one' #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#37. When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein of earth with that liquid by whose power the flowers are engendered; when the zephyr, too, with its dulcet breath, has breathed life into the tender new shoots in every copse and on every hearth, and the young sun has run half his course in the sign of the Ram, and the little birds that sleep all night with their eyes open give song (so Nature prompts them in their hearts), then, as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed many years ago, folk long to go on pilgrimages. Only, these days, professional people call them conferences.
The modern conference resembles the pilgrimage of medieval Christendom in that it allows the participants to indulge themselves in all the pleasures and diversions of travel while appearing to be austerely bent on self-improvement. To be sure, there are certain penitential exercises to be performed - the presentation of a paper, perhaps, and certainly listening to papers of others. #Quote by David Lodge

#38. Don't feel guilty if you don't immediately love your stepchildren as you do your own, or as much as you think you should. Everyoneneeds time to adjust to the new family, adults included. There is no such thing as an "instant parent."
Actually, no concrete object lies outside of the poetic sphere as long as the poet knows how to use the object properly. #Quote by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#39. Juliet and Romeo

Awake the scene, a twilight chamber'd dream,
Two angels both alike in dignity:
One imaged misadventure on the screen;
The second struck by moonlight's alchemy.
A pair of star-crossed lovers spends their night;
He in deed dreams such a sight as she,
Swing crystal scales to crispest fair delight.
In his eyes her merry fragrant dance: she
Civil thoughts and civil music meet; on
Fair Lansdowne Street where love lays its scene,
Romeo and Juliet did greet; within
Their airy eyes on hopes and thoughts unseen.
The curtain lifts on this sweet poem with woe,
For love to find Juliet and her Romeo. #Quote by Tiger Lewis

#40. Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet's life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) the poet loses his or her balance for a moment, slips into being what he or she is, uses his or her poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead person. #Quote by Jack Spicer

#41. When you choose to be a poet,
you become a place that people walk through
and then leave when they are ready #Quote by Rudy Francisco

#42. As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can't put toothbrushes in a poem. I really can't. #Quote by Sylvia Plath

#43. Various ambitions to complete the poem, to see it in print, to enjoy the gratification of someone's comment about it - serve in some measure as incentives to the writer's work. Though each of these is reasonable, each is a threat to the other ambition of the poet, which is to write as well as Keats, Yeats, or Williams - or whoever it was who scribbled onto a page a few lines whose force the reader once felt and has never forgotten. Every poet's ambition should be to write as well. Anything else is only a flirtation. #Quote by Mary Oliver

#44. I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple. #Quote by Mary Oliver

#45. Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics #Quote by Gary Snyder

#46. Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet. #Quote by John Crowe Ransom

#47. That is all. Two epochs met.
A silly little girl and an old poet. #Quote by Lina Kostenko

#48. In fact, you could say that I became a poet by renouncing poetry. #Quote by Aime Cesaire

#49. Bonaparte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and the same way the good soldier, the good astronomer, the good poet, the good player. #Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

#50. Poetry is the sister of Sorrow. Every man that suffers and weeps is a poet; every tear is a verse, and every heart a poem. #Quote by Marc-Andre Fleury

#51. That is a horrible thing in a way, but it is the one thing poets can bring back to experience, this intense focus on language, which activates words as a portal back into experience. It's a mysterious process that's very hard to articulate, because it's focused entirely on the material of language in a way, but in the interests not just of language itself whatever that would mean - that's the mistake, by the way, that so many so-called "experimental" poets make - but in service to human experience. #Quote by Matthew Zapruder

#52. It therefore should be possible for even the photographer - just as for the creative poet or painter - to use the object as a stepping stone to a realm of meaning completely beyond itself. #Quote by Clarence John Laughlin

#53. But you know, there's a difference between thinking something and feeling something. I don't know whether I ever thought an answer like that was true before. I might have. But I never felt it. And I guess what that means is that if you haven't felt something, you don't know it.'

'That reminds me of something a poet called Kabir said once,' I said.... 'He said, 'Nothing that hasn't been experienced is true. #Quote by Ptolemy Tompkins

#54. A poem is a naked person ... Some people say that I am a poet. #Quote by Bob Dylan

#55. Painters and poets have liberty to lie. #Quote by Robert Burns

#56. A poet is someone Who can pour Light into a spoon, Then raise it To nourish Your beautiful parched, holy mouth. #Quote by Hafez

#57. Like water our ideals for writing what seems at first to be a calling to pen a masterpiece, it at first can be pure, fluid even (words can come easily) but we also have to learn to work with what our eyes glaze over as weak substitutes, words that we think have no substance to what we are learning towards. What is every poet's intention? Their intention is to forge, nullify, create, defend, fill the reader with the awe and inspiration that every poet themselves craves. They want to carve a name for themselves in the annals of history, leave a not so quiet legacy behind. Poets want immortality or rather they want their words to become immortal. Perhaps even Marlowe and Shakespeare had discussions about this. #Quote by Abigail George

#58. As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that line
does me no good, because, as I've already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless. #Quote by Jorge Luis Borges

#59. I was in love with a poet. "I'm in it for the pleasure," I told my poet once, in a moment of bravado. The poet grinned at me. "I'm in it for the pain," he said. It ended sadly. The kind of ending where you wait together, holding hands and weeping, while off in another room, love slowly dies. #Quote by Abigail Thomas

#60. What else would a poet priest do on an endless night, but write of love? ... #Quote by John Geddes

#61. The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences. #Quote by Arthur Rimbaud

#62. The other strikingly modern feature of the type of poet which Euripides now introduced into the history of literature is his apparently voluntary refusal to take any part whatever in public life. Euripides was not a soldier as Aeschylus was, nor a priestly dignitary as Sophocles was, but, on the other hand, he is the very first poet who is reported to have possessed a library, and he appears to be also the first poet to lead the life of a scholar in complete retirement from the world. If the bust of him, with its tousled hair, its tired eyes and the embittered lines round the mouth, is a true portrait, and if we are right in seeing in it a discrepancy between body and spirit, and the expression of a restless and dissatisfied life, then we may say that Euripides was the first unhappy poet, the first whose poetry brought him suffering. The notion of genius in the modern sense is not merely completely strange to the ancient world; its poets and artists have nothing of the genius about them. The rational and craftsmanlike elements in art are far more important for them than the irrational and intuitive. Plato's doctrine of enthusiasm emphasized, indeed, that poets owed their work to divine inspiration and not to mere technical ability, but this idea by no means leads to the exaltation of the poet; it only increases the gulf between him and his work, and makes of him a mere instrument of the divine purpose. It is, however, of the essence of the modern notion of genius that there i #Quote by Arnold Hauser

#63. When we come to understand architecture as the essential nature of all harmonious structure we will see that it is the architecture of music that inspired Bach and Beethoven, the architecture of painting that is inspiring Picasso as it inspired Velasquez, that it is the architecture of life itself that is the inspiration of the great poets and philosophers. #Quote by Frank Lloyd Wright

#64. As for us, we behave like a herd of deer. When they flee from the huntsman's feathers in affright, which way do they turn? What haven of safety do they make for? Why, they rush upon the nets! And thus they perish by confounding what they should fear with that wherein no danger lies. . . . Not death or pain is to be feared, but the fear of death or pain. Well said the poet therefore: -

Death has no terror; only a Death of shame! #Quote by Epictetus

#65. The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter? #Quote by Paul Celan

#66. The Magpie Poet
The magpie poet lined his poems,
with a nest of shiny objects:
engagement rings returned by ex-lovers,
lipstick and keys found beneath his couch's cushions,
even shards of his mom's silver hand mirror,
too filled with images to discard.
His nest of luminous memories
held his yellow eye, his offspring.
More importantly, it held him.
Each poem he wrote was a
pro tem refuge he could hide in,
a safe house to rest his head
after another sleepless night. #Quote by Beryl Dov

#67. Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture. #Quote by Helen Hayes

#68. Imagine a twelve-year-old-girl.
Imagine her being attacked, raped and murdered.
Take your time.
Then imagine God.
M. Barin, poet #Quote by Hakan Nesser

#69. How, in the contemporary period, can we evoke the imagery that communicates the most profound and most richly developed sense of experiencing life? These images must point past themselves to that ultimate truth which must be told: that life does not have one absolutely fixed meaning. These images must point past all meanings given, beyond all definitions and relationships, to that really ineffable mystery that is just the existence, the being of ourselves and of our world. If we give that mystery an exact meaning we diminish the experience of its real depth. But when a poet carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one knows that marvelous rapture that comes from going past all categories of definition. Here we sense the function of metaphor that allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make ... #Quote by Joseph Campbell

#70. A life lived outside of one's giftedness is a complete and utter travesty. It deprives the world of the beauty we each bring to our respective space(s). It leaves us all less fulfilled and enlightened. #Quote by Shirley Houston

#71. There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull. #Quote by Sinclair Lewis

#72. To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men. #Quote by Richard Wilbur

#73. A great poet to me
is a person who can describe a painting
in such ways
that even a person
with closed eyes
can feel the pain of the artist. #Quote by Laura Chouette

#74. I feel that women of my kind are a profound mistake. There have been few women poets of distinction, and, if we count only the suicides of Sappho, Lawrence Hope and Charlotte Mew, their despair rate has been very high. #Quote by Anna Wickham

#75. What a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry of Ossian, and that of Chaucer, and even of Shakespeare and Milton, much more of Dryden, and Pope, and Gray! Our summer of English poetry, like the Greek and Latin before it, seems well advanced towards its fall, and laden with the fruit and foliage of the season, with bright autumnal tints, but soon the winter will scatter its myriad clustering and shading leaves, and leave only a few desolate and fibrous boughs to sustain the snow and rime, and creak in the blasts of age. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#76. I'm just interested in finding out what the hell goes. I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want - some bastard with wavy hair? #Quote by J.D. Salinger

#77. The pure and poorly adapted one who crashed against the world of fakes and cheats. #Quote by Cesar Vallejo

#78. I acquired expensive habits and affected manners. I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet. But nothing could have been less poetic that my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope-- an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all. But I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford's greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty. It showed me, very intermittently, that it is not enough to revolt against one's past. One day I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army; back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence. The truth was I was not a cynic by nature, only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn't found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love. Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world. #Quote by John Fowles

#79. We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death. #Quote by George Steiner

#80. Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it. #Quote by Dorothy L. Sayers

#81. Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts. #Quote by Robinson Jeffers

#82. As a writer, a poet, you're not alone in wanting to be alone. Your work is a friendship that never leaves you. #Quote by Jason E. Hodges

#83. The World comes
like a lover, courting.
But a seeker only sees
a hunter, circling its prey. #Quote by Adiela Akoo

#84. I sing in languages that I speak. So when I'm singing a Schubert song, I know precisely what every word means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or French Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever. #Quote by Jessye Norman

#85. For the critic, criticism is a form of natural self-expression, as poetry is to the poet. So, for a critic, criticism is a true thing. Criticism isn't written for poets, it's written for other readers. One hopes it is true for other readers if it's true for oneself. #Quote by Helen Vendler

#86. What? Am I to be a listener only all my days? Am I never to get my word in - I that have been so often bored by the Theseid of the ranting Cordus? Shall this one have spouted to me his comedies, and that one his love ditties, and I be unavenged? Shall I have no revenge on one who has taken up the whole day with an interminable Telephus or with an Orestes which, after filling the margin at the top of the roll and the back as well, hasn't even yet come to an end? No one knows his own house so well as I know the groves of Mars, and the cave of Vulcan near the cliffs of Aeolus. What the winds are brewing; whose souls Aeacus has on the rack; from what country another worthy is carrying off that stolen golden fleece; how big are the ash trees which Monychus hurls as missiles: these are the themes with which Fronto's plane trees and marble halls are for ever ringing until the pillars quiver and quake under the continual recitations; such is the kind of stuff you may look for from every poet, greatest or least. Well, I too have slipped my hand from under the cane; I too have counselled Sulla to retire from public life and take a deep sleep; it is a foolish clemency when you jostle against poets at every corner, to spare paper that will be wasted anyhow. But if you can give me time, and will listen quietly to reason, I will tell you why I prefer to run in the same course over which Lucilius, the great nursling of Aurunca drove his horses. #Quote by Juvenal

#87. The relation between a poet and audience is really insignificant. What matters is the poet is hearing something that he is broadcasting. And whether there is anybody with a receiver isn't the reason he does it. He hopes there is somebody receiving it. #Quote by Peter Davison

#88. There are some situations which men understand by instinct, by which reason is powerless to explain; in such cases the greatest poet is he who gives utterance to the most natural and vehement outburst of sorrow. Those who hear the bitter cry are as much impressed as if they listened to an entire poem, and when th sufferer is sincere they are right in regarding his outburst as sublime. #Quote by Alexandre Dumas

#89. The south produced statesmen and soldiers, planters and doctors and lawyers and poets, but certainly no engineers and mechanics. Let Yankees adopt such low callings. #Quote by Margaret Mitchell

#90. The true poem is not that which the public read. There is always a poem not printed on paper, ... in the poet's life. It is what hehas become through his work. Not how is the idea expressed in stone, or on canvas or paper, is the question, but how far it has obtained form and expression in the life of the artist. His true work will not stand in any prince's gallery. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#91. The Child Christ lives on from generation to generation in the poets, very often the frailest of men but men whose frailty is redeemed by a child's unworldliness, by a child's delight in loveliness, by the spirit of wonder.

Christ was a poet, and all through His life the Child remains perfect in Him. It was the poet, the unworldly poet, who was King of the invisible kingdom; the priests and rulers could not understand that. The poets understand it, and they, too, are kings of the invisible kingdom, vassal kings of the Lord of Love, and their crowns are crowns of thorns indeed. #Quote by Caryll Houselander

#92. from "After the Fall"

When Kennedy dropped from the sky
To honor the poet Frost, ...
So MacLeish spoke.."Not
To mention Robert Frost. For Frost,
Of course, is another matter, as he
Always was, spoke to the throng an the one
Hatless in October, but days before
Dallas and November. #Quote by Alan W. Powers

#93. It is the mark of a great poet to write words that feel as though they have stood witness to your most intimate memory of love. #Quote by Lang Leav

#94. A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet. #Quote by Victor Hugo

#95. To hold the courage to let another witness our tears, while refuting fears invitation to shield face, is to grant the most privileged of all loving intimacies to them. #Quote by Ged Thompson Liverpool Poet

#96. An old poet, Robert Herrick, put it like this: " Our life is short, and our days run As fast away as does the sun; And, as a vapour or a drop of rain Once lost, can ne'er be found again. #Quote by Douglas Preston

#97. Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance #Quote by Philip Larkin

#98. I am not sure, once a poet has found out what has been written already, and how it was written - once, in short, he has learnt his trade - that he should bother with literature at all. Poetry is not like surgery, a technique that can be copied. Every operation the poet performs is unique, and need never be done again. #Quote by Philip Larkin

#99. [To] turn poet, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper. #Quote by Miguel De Cervantes

#100. Everybody we know surrounds himself with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage, and all manner of toys, as screens to interpose between himself and his guest. Does it not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a full rencontre front to front with his fellow? #Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

#101. I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once moreonly the words Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus,
those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcaeus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#102. Do you wanna be a poet and write? Do you wanna be an actor up in lights? Do you wanna be soldier, and fight for love? Do you wanna travel the world? Do you wanna be a diver for pearls? Or climb the mountain, and touch the clouds above? Be anyone you want to be. Bring to life your fantasies. But I want something in return, I want you to burn, burn for me, baby. Like a candle in the night. Oh burn, burn for me, burn for me. #Quote by Jo Dee Messina

#103. God created the earth and the moon,
The sun and star, bird and beast, and we all
No name of God embossed on them at all. #Quote by Manuel Newton-Management Consultant And Poet MA M.Com LLB ICWA FIBAM FIMM Etc Http Elsela-newtonsboo

#104. At a time when pimpery, lick-spittlery, and picking the public's pocket are the order of the day - indeed, officially proclaimed as virtue - the poet must play the madcap to keep his balance. And ours. #Quote by Studs Terkel

#105. It was about that time [415 BCE] that the poet Diagoras of Melos was proscribed for atheism, he having declared that the non-punishment of a certain act of iniquity proved that there were no gods. It has been surmised, with some reason, that the iniquity in question was the slaughter of the Melians by the Athenians in 416 BCE, and the Athenian resentment in that case was personal and political rather than religious. For some time after 415 the Athenian courts made strenuous efforts to punish every discoverable case of impiety; and parodies of the Eleusinian mysteries were alleged against Alcibiades and others. Diagoras, who was further charged with divulging the Eleusinian and other mysteries, and with making firewood of an image of Herakles, telling the god thus to perform his thirteenth labour by cooking turnips, became thenceforth one of the proverbial atheists of the ancient world, and a reward of a silver talent was offered for killing him, and of two talents for his capture alive; despite which he seems to have escaped. #Quote by J.M. Robertson

#106. Molecules are moving. Universes are colliding. Generations are being born and dying simultaneously, throughout eternity. As one of our great American poets, Walt Whitman, once said: "I contain multitudes." #Quote by Frederick Lenz

#107. What a comfort to know that God is a poet. #Quote by Rachel Held Evans

#108. To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#109. Virgil, above all poets, had a stock which I may call almost inexhaustible, of figurative, elegant, and sounding words. #Quote by John Dryden

#110. If you should see/a man/walking
down a crowded street/ talking aloud/ to himself
don't run/in the opposite direction
but run toward him/for he is a poet!

You have nothing to fear/from a poet
but the truth #Quote by Ted Joans

#111. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it and not lose too much time and too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people.
Rilke, Rainer Maria (1993-09-17). Letters to a Young Poet (p. 22). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. #Quote by Rainer Maria Rilke

#112. Some 2,600 years ago the ancient Greek poet Pindar wrote, "Become who you are by learning who you are." What he meant is the following: You are born with a particular makeup and tendencies that mark you as a piece of fate. It is who you are to the core. Some people never become who they are; they stop trusting in themselves; they conform to the tastes of others, and they end up wearing a mask that hides their true nature. If you allow yourself to learn who you really are by paying attention to that voice and force within you, then you can become what you were fated to become - an individual, a Master. #Quote by Robert Greene

#113. In truth, I'm still slightly embarrassed to say, I am a poet. I'd rather say, I make poems. #Quote by Henri Cole

#114. For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary. #Quote by Joseph Campbell

#115. The poet's discourse can be compared to the track of a charged particle through a cloud-chamber. An energised field of association and connotation, of overtones and undertones, of rebus and homophone, surround its motion, and break from it in the context of collision .. in Western poetry so much of the charged substance is previous poetry. #Quote by George Steiner

#116. It is worthwhile adding that the power of the poem to teach not only sensibilities and the subtle movements of the spirit but knowledge, real lasting felt knowledge, is going mostly unnoticed among our scholars. The body of knowledge locked into and releasable from poetry can replace practically any university in the Republic. First things first, then: the primal importance of a poem is what it can add to the individual mind.
Poetry is the voice of a poet at its birth, and the voice of a people in its ultimate fulfillment as a successful and useful work of art. #Quote by Guy Davenport

#117. We called the album 'Amarantine' to mean everlasting. Poets use the word to describe an everlasting flower and I loved the image of that. #Quote by Enya

#118. When it hurts,' wrote the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, 'we return to the banks of certain rivers, #Quote by Olivia Laing

#119. Primitives of our own species, even today are historically shallow in their knowledge of the past. Only the poet who writes speaks his message across the millennia to other hearts. #Quote by Loren Eiseley

#120. But, it is well known, what strikes the capricious mind of the poet is not always what affects the mass of readers. #Quote by Alexandre Dumas

#121. Nations conquered and true love prevails, all encompassed in a poets tale. #Quote by R.J. Craddock

#122. First Snow

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning; such
an oracular fever! flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! and only now,
deep into night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles; nowhere
the familiar things:
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect
and nightly turn from. Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain - not a single
answer has been found -
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one. #Quote by Mary Oliver

#123. My dad wanted to name me after Rainier Maria Rilke, the poet. #Quote by Rainn Wilson

#124. Mab Jones' poetry is suffused with a cool wit and a wisdom beyond her years. She is a superb performance poet in the tradition of Joolz Denby and Pam Ayres and, like them, her work is beautifully layered and contains bittersweet depths. #Quote by Phill Jupitus

#125. Every really able man, in whatever direction he works - a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter - if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be. What is this Better, this flying Ideal, but the perpetual promise of his Creator? #Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

#126. Let go of the ones who don't want to stay. Let go of a love that wants to end, let go of yesterday, focus on the now, on yourself. Let a love's end, be the beginning of yourself. #Quote by Ventum

#127. I am a ‪#Poet‬ therefore I believe in the
impossible I dream of Peace on earth
and Peace within myself!

Richard M Knittle Jr. #Quote by Richard M. Knittle Jr.

#128. Poetry is an art of expressing the unknown music of our inner feelings and emotions in our known language. #Quote by Debasish Mridha

#129. There are many unspeakable words, forgotten, or forbidden.
Great thanks to the poets who make them all become reachable. #Quote by Toba Beta

#130. Interbeing: If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. "Interbeing" is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix "inter-" with the verb "to be," we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger's father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.

Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper #Quote by Thich Nhat Hanh

#131. Each tear is a poet, a healer, a teacher. #Quote by Rune Lazuli

#132. Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#133. Since I have the obligation to take care of the needs of my family, I have decided to use a talent which, I believe, has been given to me. I am a poet ... Phew! You know, reader, what I and all sensible people think about that. #Quote by Multatuli

#134. There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library. #Quote by Anthony Hecht

#135. And now he is singing a bard's curse upon you, O brother abbot, and upon your father and your mother, and your grandfather and your grandmother, nd upon all your relations.'
Is he cursing in rhyme?'
He is cursing in rhyme, and with two assonances in every line of his curse.'
("The Crucifixion Of The Outcast") #Quote by W.B.Yeats

#136. A country that denies it, citizens, the opportunity to "civil liberties", better health care, schools, roads, electricity and water. Is a country on a brink of no return. #Quote by Henry Johnson Jr

#137. I'm in love with you Renata. I know I'm not a poet – shit, not even close. I don't have all the fancy words I wish I could say to you … but I want you to know that what I'm feeling for you is real. I love you. #Quote by Lara Adrian

#138. I'm a poet who can whine in meter #Quote by Sherman Alexie

#139. 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. #Quote by William Kingdon Clifford

#140. Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower - and this is the burden of the curse of Babel. #Quote by Percy Bysshe Shelley

#141. America is a dream.
The poet says it was promises.
The people say it is promises - that will come true.
The people do not always say things out loud,
Nor write them down on paper.
The people often hold
Great thoughts in their deepest hearts
And sometimes only blunderingly express them,
Haltingly and stumbling say them,
And faultily put them into practice.
The people do not always understand each other.
But there is, somewhere there,
Always the trying to understand,
And the trying to say,
You are a man. Together we are building our land. #Quote by Langston Hughes

#142. I thought that perhaps the most creative mix for a society would be nine parts solid worker from institutions like MIT to one part poet from Marrakech, but in spite of the fact that I myself had been trained to be one of the solid workers, which meant that all of my sympathies lay with that group, I would not surrender the poet. The problem was to find him. #Quote by James A. Michener

#143. Catch my heart and take my Hand to find yourself some Big Time Love. #Quote by Gemini Rising Rockin' Machine, The

#144. Good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#145. Only when a system behaves in a sufficiently random way may the difference between past and future, and therefore irreversibility, enter into its description...The arrow of time is the manifestation of the fact that the future is not given, that, as the French poet Paul Valery emphasized, 'time is a construction'. #Quote by Ilya Prigogine

#146. To love is a natural instinct. To be loved is "something". To be loved like crazy, like their life depends on you is a once-in-a-lifetime feeling. How many of us can keep their right hand on their heart and say that they have actually experienced something like that? Not many, I guess. Because you know what, once-in-a-lifetime moments, well, come once in a lifetime. You either have to extremely, enormously and tremendously lucky or have to manage to fascinate a poet or a painter or someone really very naïve or mentally unsound. #Quote by Daya Kudari

#147. Poets are damned ... but see with the eyes of angels. #Quote by Allen Ginsberg

#148. As poets, we don't accept oppression; we are about a freedom of spirit, or whatever you want to call it. I think environmental concerns have to go to the deep place, so we speak from a place of great empathy for the planet - for the disadvantaged people, animals, places, cultures. #Quote by Alison Hawthorne Deming

#149. I wanted James Carville to never die. I wanted Dylan, the poet, to not die. I wanted to put these people in a place where they would be inviolate. It wasn't enough to have a still life of them. I wanted to surround them with the lives they led. #Quote by D. A. Pennebaker

#150. Poetry is one last hiccup; born on the lips of a dying poet. #Quote by Tripurari

#151. You will find the poet who wrings the heart of the world, or the foremost captain of his time, driving a bargain or paring a potato, just as you would do. #Quote by Rebecca Harding Davis

#152. The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor. #Quote by W. H. Auden

#153. I always knew that sooner or later there would come somebody like Woody Guthrie who could make a great song every week. Dylan certainly had a social agenda, but he was such a good poet that most of his attempts were head and shoulders above things that I and others were trying to do ... If I had an address, I'd send him a birthday card saying, 'keep on going.' #Quote by Pete Seeger

#154. What happened?

It took Gibbon six volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so I shan't embark on that. But thinking about this almost incredible episode does tell one something about the nature of civilisation.

It shows that however complex and solid it seems, it is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed.



What are its enemies?


Well, first of all fear - fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague and famine, that make it simply not worthwhile constructing things, or planting trees or even planning next year's crops. And fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren't question anything or change anything.

The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence. And then exhaustion, the feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of material prosperity. 

There is a poem by the modern Greek poet, Cavafy, in which he imagines the people of an antique town like Alexandria waiting every day for the barbarians to come and sack the city. Finally the barbarians move off somewhere else and the city is saved; but the people are disappointed - it would have been better than nothing.

Of course, civilisation requires a modicum of material prosperity - 

What civilization needs:

confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one's own mental p #Quote by Kenneth Clark

#155. For five hundred years after Walther's death - until Goethe - no German lyric poet was his equal. #Quote by Walther Von Der Vogelweide

#156. A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered. #Quote by Lee Strasberg

#157. Carol looked at her. "How do you become a poet?"
"By feeling things - too much, I suppose," Therese answered conscientiously. #Quote by Patricia Highsmith

#158. The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper #Quote by E. O. Wilson

#159. She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog. #Quote by Stephen King

#160. Her shining tresses, divided in two parts, encircle the harmonious contour of her white and delicate cheeks, brilliant in their glow and freshness. Her ebony brows have the form and charm of the bow of Kama, the god of love, and beneath her long silken lashes the purest reflections and a celestial light swim, as in the sacred lakes of Himalaya, in the black pupils of her great clear eyes. Her teeth, fine, equal, and white, glitter between her smiling lips like dewdrops in a passion-flower's half-enveloped breast. Her delicately formed ears, her vermilion hands, her little feet, curved and tender as the lotus-bud, glitter with the brilliancy of the loveliest pearls of Ceylon, the most dazzling diamonds of Golconda. Her narrow and supple waist, which a hand may clasp around, sets forth the outline of her rounded figure and the beauty of her bosom, where youth in its flower displays the wealth of its treasures; and beneath the silken folds of her tunic she seems to have been modelled in pure silver by the godlike hand of Vicvarcarma, the immortal sculptor. #Quote by Jules Verne

#161. Poetry is difficult, I mean interesting poetry, not confessional babble or emotive propaganda. Reading a new poet is discovering an entire world, what Stevens called a 'mundo' and it takes a lot of time to orientate oneself in such a world. What we have to learn to do then, as teachers and militants of a poetic insurgency, is to encourage people to learn to love the difficulty of poetry. I simply do not understand much of the poetry that I love. #Quote by Simon Critchley

#162. Watch carefully. In forty formidable bosoms we are about to create a climacteric of emotion. In one short speech - or maybe two - I propose to steer your women through excitement, superiority, contempt and anger: we shall have a little drama; just, awful and poetic, spread with uncials and full, as the poet said, of fruit and seriosity. Will they thank me, I wonder? #Quote by Dorothy Dunnett

#163. I tossed a stone into the Sea To see what it would do for me And the ripples went out And became ocean waves To return to the Sea inside of me #Quote by Mark A.Y. Nunez

#164. If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch. #Quote by Henry Miller

#165. In his book The Captive Mind, written in 1951-2 and published in the West in 1953, the Polish poet and essayist Czeslaw Milosz paid Orwell one of the greatest compliments that one writer has ever bestowed upon another. Milosz had seen the Stalinisation of Eastern Europe from the inside, as a cultural official. He wrote, of his fellow-sufferers:

A few have become acquainted with Orwell's 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. Such a form of writing is forbidden by the New Faith because allegory, by nature manifold in meaning, would trespass beyond the prescriptions of socialist realism and the demands of the censor. Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life.

Only one or two years after Orwell's death, in other words, his book about a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party was itself a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party. #Quote by Christopher Hitchens

#166. To love a poet is to love a moment. #Quote by James Wylder

#167. Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult ... The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning. #Quote by T. S. Eliot

#168. Though science makes no use for poetry, poetry is enriched by science. Poetry "takes up" the scientific vision and re-expresses its truths, but always in forms which compel us to look beyond them to the total object which is telling its own story and standing in its own rights. In this the poet and the philosopher are one. Using language as the lever, they lift thought above the levels where words perplex and retard its flight, and leave it, at last, standing face to face with the object which reveals itself. #Quote by L.P. Jacks

#169. Superior poets say what they really feel. Mediocre poets say what they decide to feel. Inferior poets say what they think they should feel. #Quote by Alvaro De Campos

#170. An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy. #Quote by Charles Williams

#171. May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby. #Quote by Julian Barnes

#172. Poets should speak out against what we see as the assault against our Constitution and the warmongering that's going on. I'm perfectly willing to lay down my life for my Constitution, but I am not willing to take a life for it or any other reason because I think killing people is counterproductive. #Quote by Sam Hamill

#173. In the entr'acte Levin and Pestsov fell into an argument upon the merits and defects of music of the Wagner school. Levin maintained that the mistake of Wagner and all his followers lay in their trying to take music into the sphere of another art, just as poetry goes wrong when it tries to paint a face as the art of painting ought to do, and as an instance of this mistake he cited the sculptor who carved in marble certain poetic phantasms flitting round the figure of the poet on the pedestal. "These phantoms were so far from being phantoms that they were positively clinging on the ladder," said Levin. [ ... ] Pestsov maintained that art is one, and that it can attain its highest manifestations only by conjunction with all kinds of art. #Quote by Leo Tolstoy

#174. Poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common thingsor it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth. #Quote by Walter Pater

#175. Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently. #Quote by Jean Cocteau

#176. My responsibility as a poet, as an artist, is to not look away. #Quote by Nikky Finney

#177. I think being a poet, period, is isolating. #Quote by Victoria Chang

#178. Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit. #Quote by Upton Sinclair

#179. The most significant events, Bishop seems to argue, are destined to remain outside the scope of description. It is perhaps their very status as excessive or fugitive that makes them, in the end, significant. A poet who believes such things will not arrive uncomplicatedly at self-description. #Quote by Dan Chiasson

#180. I'm a poet and you are poetry #Quote by Dylan Anders Porter

#181. Imagining is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints. #Quote by John Dryden

#182. I am a warrior, that my son may be a merchant - and his son may be a poet. #Quote by Diana Gabaldon

#183. Did the gods once mingle with humankind, or is Homer a visionary madman, or, what is worse, a mere poet, a maker-up of beautiful falsities, an elegant liar? I shall grapple with that perplexity, only to emerge as I went in, in a cloud of unknowing, if perhaps a little the wiser. #Quote by Eva Brann

#184. Francis Webb is easily our greatest poet and one of the greatest poets in the world but he's hardly ever mentioned. #Quote by Robert Adamson

#185. If you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets. #Quote by Pauline Kael

#186. We must be careful to make a distinction between the intellectual and the person of intellectual achievement. The two are very, very different animals. There are people of intellectual achievement who increase the sum of human knowledge, the powers of human insight, and analysis. And then there are the intellectuals. An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others. Starting in the early twentieth century, for the first time an ordinary storyteller, a novelist, a short story writer, a poet, a playwright, in certain cases a composer, an artist, or even an opera singer could achieve a tremendous eminence by becoming morally indignant about some public issue. It required no intellectual effort whatsoever. Suddenly he was elevated to a plane from which he could look down upon ordinary people. Conversely - this fascinates me - conversely, if you are merely a brilliant scholar, merely someone who has added immeasurably to the sum of human knowledge and the powers of human insight, that does not qualify you for the eminence of being an intellectual. #Quote by Tom Wolfe

#187. I cannot now think symbols less
than the greatest of all powers whether they are used consciously by
the master of magic or half unconsciously by their successors, the
poet, the musician, and the artist. #Quote by W.B.Yeats

#188. What is a great spiritual practitioner? A person who lives always in the presence of his or her own true self, someone who has found and who uses continually the springs and sources of profound inspiration. As the modern English writer Lewis Thompson wrote: 'Christ, supreme poet, lived truth so passionately that every gesture of his, at once pure Act and perfect Symbol, embodies the transcendent.'
To embody the transcendent is why we are here. #Quote by Sogyal Rinpoche

#189. Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets. #Quote by Annie Dillard

#190. Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. #Quote by W. H. Auden

#191. Oft morning dreams presage approaching fate, For morning dreams, as poets tell, are true. #Quote by Michael Bruce

#192. It is a marble statue of a man with his children near him, and the man has such desperation on his face and the children at his feet appear to be clinging, begging him, while he gazes out toward the world with a tortured look, his hands pulling at his nouth, but his children look only at him, and when I finally saw this, I said inside myself, Oh.
I read the placard, which let me know that these children are offering themselves as food for their father, he is being starved to death in prison, and these children only want one thing - to have their father's distress disappear. They will allow him - oh, happily, happily - to eat them.
And I thought, So that guy knew. Meaning the sculptor. He knew.
And so did the poet who wrote what the sculpture has shown. He knew too. #Quote by Elizabeth Strout

#193. Very Like a Whale

One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can'ts seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have
to go out
of their way to say that it is like something else.
What foes it mean when we are told
That the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?
In the first place, George Gordon Byron had had enough experience
To know that it probably wasn't just one Assyrian, it was a lot
of Assyrians.
However, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and thus
hinder longevity,
We'll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity.
Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were gleaming
in purple and gold,
Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a wolf
on
the fold?
In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy there
are
a great many things,
But i don't imagine that among then there is a wolf with purple
and gold
cohorts or purple and gold anythings.
No, no, Lord Byron, before I'll believe that this Assyrian was actually
like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;
Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red
mouth and
big white teeth and did he say Woof woof?
Fra #Quote by Ogden Nash

#194. The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. In pop terms, Morrissey is the supreme poet of reflective nostalgia. #Quote by Simon Reynolds

#195. Like an abandoned dog who cannot find
a smell or a track and roams
along the roads, with no road, like
the child who in a night of the fair
gets lost among the crowd,
and the air is dusty, and the candles
fluttering,
astounded, his heart
weighed down by music and by pain;
that's how I am, drunk, sad by nature,
a mad and lunar guitarist, a poet,
and an ordinary man lost in dreams,
searching constantly for God among the mists. #Quote by Antonio Machado

#196. It was a little harder when I first went to Egypt when I was 18 years old and being a white woman with a knapsack and in blue jeans. But again I was part of the rucksack revolution there was some grace there. You could put it that way. And confidence as well because I thought of myself as a poet. That was part of it. I was going for that, to have experiences to make the work. #Quote by Anne Waldman

#197. By(e) pen, I've tried my hand at poetry; only to see how boring it is to me. That is, unless I get a chance to destroy each and every piece while doing it as I please. #Quote by Criss Jami

#198. May I discard the outer cover of time from the layers of poetry by immersing the poet in its entirety within me #Quote by Suman Pokhrel

#199. There have always been huge musicians and poets in Uruguay, but Uruguay is a well-kept secret. #Quote by Juan Campodonico

#200. Time eateth all things, could old poets say, The times are chang'd, our times drink all away. #Quote by Benjamin Franklin