Great Poet Quotes - Page 3

• When I say be creative I don't mean that you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem.

  Rajneesh

  Inspirational, Spiritual, Mean

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• [Thanatopsis] was written in 1817, when Bryant was 23. Had he died then, the world would have thought it had lost a great poet. But he lived on.

  William C. Bryant

  World, Poet, Lost

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• If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur, it is certain that they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere -- probably more than the rest of the world combined. Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations -- many rare combinations. To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.

  Walt Whitman

  Numbers, People, Personality

  Walt Whitman (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Walt Whitman (Illustrated)”, p.1480, Delphi Classics

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• Michel Aflaq - is bad poetry wrapped in the guise of utopian politics, or great poetry wrapped in the guise of horrible politics.

  Elliott Colla

  Horrible, Great Poetry, Utopian

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• A great emotion is too selfish ; it takes into itself all the blood of the spirit, and the congestion leaves the hands too cold to write. Three sorts of emotion produce great poetry - strong but quick emotions, seized upon for art as soon as they have passed, but not before they have passed ; strong and deep emotions in their remembrance along time after ; and false emotions, that is to say, emotions felt in the intellect. Not insincerity, but a translated sincerity, is the basis of all art.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Strong, Art, Selfish

  Fernando Pessoa (1988). “Always Astonished: Selected Prose”, p.53, City Lights Books

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• For next to being a great poet is the power of understanding one.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Understanding, Next, Poet

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1854). “The Works: Hyperion”, p.62

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• Like a great poet, Nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means. These are simply a sun, trees, flowers, water and love. Of course, if the spectator be without the last, the whole will present but a pitiful appearance, and in that case, the sun is merely so many miles in diameter, the trees are good for fuel, the flowers are classified by stamens, and the water is simply wet.

  Heinrich Heine

  Nature, Flower, Mean

  Heinrich Heine (1873). “Scintillations from the Prose Works of Heinrich Heine: I. Florentine Nights. II. Excerpts”, p.169

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• Do you remember any great poet that ever illustrated the higher fields of humanity that did not dignify the use of wine from Homer on down?

  James A. McDougall

  Wine, Humanity, Fields

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• You don't have to live in a garage to write great poetry.

  Felix Dennis

  Writing, Great Poetry, Garage

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• It will be hard James but you come from sturdy peasant stock men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity You come from a long line of great poets some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said "The very time I thought I was lost My dungeon shook and my chains fell off." You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you James and Godspeed.

  James A. Baldwin

  Country, Men, Odds

  "A Letter to My Nephew" by James Baldwin, progressive.org. January 1, 1962.

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• When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.

  T. S. Eliot

  Poetry, Done, Certain

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Notes towards the Definition of Culture”, p.119, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• As the great poet wrote, ‘To thine own self be true.’…What? You don’t think a Skotos can be literate? I happen to love Shakespeare. Hamlet is one of my faves. (Zeth) I’m not touching that one with tongs and a gas mask. (Jericho)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Thinking, Self, Touching

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• I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.

  Francois Mauriac

  Believe, Novelists, Firsts

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• Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?

  Susanna Kaysen

  Singers, Madness, Poet

  Susanna Kaysen (2013). “Girl, Interrupted”, p.48, Vintage

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• I like to borrow a metaphor from the great poet and mystic Rumi who talks about living like a drawing compass. One leg of the compass is static. It is fixed and rooted in a certain spot. Meanwhile, the other leg draws a huge wide circle around the first one, constantly moving. Just like that, one part of my writing is based in Istanbul. It has strong local roots. Yet at the same time the other part travels the whole wide world, feeling connected to several cities, cultures, and peoples.

  Elif Safak

  Strong, Moving, Writing

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• There are few greater treasures to be acquired in youth than great poetry-and prose-stored in the memory. At the time one may resent the labor of storing. But they sleep in the memory and awake in later years, illuminated by life and illuminating it.

  Richard Livingstone

  Memories, Sleep, Years

  Richard Livingstone (2013). “On Education”, p.101, Cambridge University Press

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• To paraphrase the great poet Dante, the heavens swirl above us and our eyes are still cast to the ground.

  Vanna Bonta

  Eye, Heaven, Poet

  "Sex in Space". History Channel's "The Universe" (TV series), Season 3, Episode 4, 2008.

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• Jesus of Nazareth could have chosen simply to express Himself in moral precepts; but like a great poet He chose the form of the parable, wonderful short stories that entertained and clothed the moral precept in an eternal form. It is not sufficient to catch man's mind, you must also catch the imaginative faculties of his mind.

  Dudley Nichols

  Jesus, Men, Mind

  "Film and/as literature". Book by John Harrington, p. 238, 1977.

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• Elegance? It may seem odd to non-scientists, but there is an aesthetic in software as there is in every other area of intellectual endeavour. Truly great programmers are like great poets or great mathematicians - they can achieve in a few lines what lesser mortals can only approach in three volumes

  John Naughton

  Intellectual, Three, Lines

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• No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet.

  Claude Monet

  Poet, Painter

  Claude Monet (1999). “Monet by himself: paintings, drawings, pastels, letters”

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• I cant look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do.

  Isaac Rosenberg

  Simple, Looks, Way

  Isaac Rosenberg (2015). “Delphi Complete Poetry, Plays, Letters and Prose of Isaac Rosenberg (Illustrated)”, p.325, Delphi Classics

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• Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.

  Aravind Adiga

  Beautiful, Gun, Boys

  Aravind Adiga (2008). “The White Tiger”, p.163, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• The adoption of the required attitude of mind towards ideas that seem to emerge "of their own free will" and the abandonment of the critical function that is normally in operation against them seem to be hard of achievement for some people. The "involuntary thoughts" are liable to release a most violent resistance, which seeks to prevent their emergence. If we may trust that great poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, however, poetic creation must demand an exactly similar attitude.

  Sigmund Freud

  Attitude, Ideas, People

  Sigmund Freud, Angela Richards (1953). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud”

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• Shakespeare wrote great poetry and preposterous plays. Who really cares, for example, which petty tyrant rules Milan? Or who succeeds to the throne of Denmark? Or why the barons ganged up on Richard II?

  Edward Abbey

  Play, Tyrants, Example

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.35, RosettaBooks

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• Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it. To the great poet, there is only one method of music - his own. To the great painter, there is only one manner of painting - that which he himself employs. The aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms and all modes. It is to him that Art makes her appeal.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Pain, Appreciate

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “The critic as artist (low cost). Limited edition”, p.77, Oscar Wilde

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