Poet Quotes - Page 7

• The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Heaven, Splits, Orthodoxy

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.11, Simon and Schuster

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• See how weak prose is.... Presently I shall go to a bar and there one or two poets will speak to me and I to them and we will try to destroy each other or attract each other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking in prose.

  Jack Spicer

  Two, Trying, Bars

  Jack Spicer (2010). “My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer”, p.172, Wesleyan University Press

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• Does it mean this, does it mean that, that's all anybody wants to know. I'd say what any decent poet would say if anyone dared ask him to analyze his work: if you see it, darling, then it's there!

  Freddie Mercury

  Mean, Doe, Want

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• For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

  Richard P. Feynman

  Artist, Past, Men

  Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, Matthew Sands (2015). “The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I: The New Millennium Edition: Mainly Mechanics, Radiation, and Heat”, p.119, Basic Books

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• Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were "I go to seek a Great Perhaps." That's why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.

  John Green

  Real, Alaska, Waiting

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• Through the ingenuousness of her age beamed an ardent mind, a mind not of the women but of the poet; she did not please, she intoxicated.

  Alexandre Dumas

  Mind, Age, Please

  Alexandre Dumas (1853). “The three musketeers, tr. by W. Robson”, p.195

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• For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Sports, Children, School

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• There was nothing to do but wait. It is always like this for naturalists, and for poets--the long hours of travel and preparation, and then the longer hours of waiting. All for that one electric, pulse-revving vision when the universe suddenly declares itself.

  Diane Ackerman

  Long, Waiting, Preparation

  Diane Ackerman (2011). “Moon By Whale Light: And Other Adventures Among Bats,Penguins, Crocodilians, and Whales”, p.33, Vintage

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• That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.

  Virginia Woolf

  Character, Mean, Thinking

  Virginia Woolf (1932). “A Letter to a Young Poet”

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• Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.

  Dorianne Laux

  Asks

  Kim Addonizio, Dorianne Laux (2010). “The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry”, p.23, W. W. Norton & Company

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• For within livin structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets.

  Audre Lorde

  Men, Feelings, Structure

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.39, Crossing Press

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• When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied . "It's so seldom I have one.

  Bill Bryson

  Notebook, Ideas, Records

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• This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Spiritual, Believe, Emotional

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.178, A&C Black

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• You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.

  Rick Riordan

  Art, Creativity, Purpose

  Rick Riordan (2007). “The Titan's curse”

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• Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

  George Eliot

  Saint, Sage, Maggie

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.6043, Delphi Classics

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• Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.

  Sylvia Plath

  Sylvia Plath (2000). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962”, Anchor

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• She has her own glamour, Willy lad. All poets do, all the bards and artists, all the musicians who truly take the music into their own hearts. They all straddle the border of Faerie, and they see into both worlds. Not dependably into either, perhaps, but that uncertainty keeps them honest and at a distance.

  Emma Bull

  Distance, Heart, Artist

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• Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Dream, Night, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.199, Penguin

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• The more the poet grows, the deeper the level of creative intuition descends into the density of his soul. Where formerly he could be moved to song, he can do nothing now, he must dig deeper.

  Jacques Maritain

  Song, Creative, Soul

  Jacques Maritain (1966). “Challenges and renewals: selected readings”

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• The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing?

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Writing, Opposites, Focus

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2009). “Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything”, p.30, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• I think a lot about the poems I wasn't able to write...I masturbrated...Solitude is essentially a matter of pride; you bury yourself in your own scent. The issue is the same for all real poets. If you've been happy for too long, you become banal. By the same token, if you've been unhappy for a long time, you lose your poetic power...Happiness and poverty can only coexist for the briefest time. Afterword either happiness coarsens the poet or the poem is so true it destroys his happiness.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Real, Writing, Pride

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• A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.

  W. H. Auden

  Hope, Food, Cooking

  Collected Poems (1976) p. 639

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• Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet's dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.

  Oscar Wilde

  Dream, Depressing, Reality

  "The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde".

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• The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.

  Rollo May

  Lines, Lovers, Assembly

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• The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none. A language must be found…of the soul, for the soul and will include everything: perfumes, sounds colors, thought grappling with thought

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Animal, Fire, Color

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