Great Poet Quotes - Page 4

• 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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• The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish’.

  Mitch Albom

  Caring, Love Is, Support And Love

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• I look at the great poets of the Soviet Union, like Anna Akhmatova, who endured far worse then anything we've seen or hopefully that we will ever see. If they could keep writing and keep a voice alive, keep people hopeful through their poetry, then I would be ashamed to stop and to give in. It would be really self-indulgent, unacceptable, and inexcusable to walk away from it.

  Sara Paretsky

  Writing, Self, Voice

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• The saying, "The Magyar is much too lazy to be bored," is worth thinking about. Only the most subtle and active animals are capable of boredom.--A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom on the seventh day of creation.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Animal, Thinking, Boredom

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• Many have genius, but, wanting art, are forever dumb. The two must go together to form the great poet, painter, or sculptor.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Art, Two, Forever

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Illustrated)”, p.2078, Delphi Classics

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• Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.

  Dana Gioia

  Culture, Loyal, Speak

  Dana Gioia (2002). “Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture”, Graywolf Pr

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• Great Poets discover themselves. Little Poets have to be 'discovered' by somebody else.

  Marie Corelli

  Littles, Poet

  Marie Corelli (1905). “Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct”

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• He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child. He must take to pieces the whole web of his mind. He must unlearn much of that knowledge which has perhaps constituted hitherto his chief title to superiority. His very talents will be a hindrance to him.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Children, Poetry, Mind

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• I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming out of the music world, the two of them.

  Clive Davis

  Views, Two, America

  "Clive Davis in No Spin Zone". "The O'Reilly Factor" with Bill O'Reilly, www.foxnews.com. March 07, 2013.

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• There is, in all great poets, a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Exercise, Poetry, Humanity

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2011). “Natural Abundance: Ralph Waldo Emerson's Guide to Prosperity”, p.184, Simon and Schuster

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• A great poet does not express his or her self; he expresses all of our selves.

  Gary Snyder

  Self, Doe, Poet

  Gary Snyder, William Scott McLean (1980). “The Real Work: Interviews & Talks, 1964-1979”, p.65, New Directions Publishing

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• The more serious poetry of the race has a philosophical structure of thought. It contains beliefs and conceptions in regard to the nature of man and the universe, God and the soul, fate and providence, suffering, evil and destiny. Great poetry always has, like the higher religion, a metaphysical content. It deals with the same august issues, experiences and conceptions as metaphysics or first philosophy.

  Joseph Alexander Leighton

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Fate

  Joseph Alexander Leighton (1919). “The field of philosophy: an outline of lectures on introduction to philosophy”

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• Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.

  T. S. Eliot

  Poetry, Literature, Language

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• I'm not a great poetry fan.

  Rupert Everett

  Fans, Great Poetry

  "Rupert Everett: 'If I'd been straight? I'd be doing what Hugh Grant and Colin Firth do, I suppose" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. July 20, 2009.

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• A great poet has seldom sung of lawfully wedded happiness, but of free and secret love; and in this respect, too the time is coming when there will no longer be one standard of morality for poetry and another for life. To anyone tender of conscience, the ties formed by a free connection are stronger than the legal ones.

  Ellen Key

  Marriage, Ties, Secret Love

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• I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

  Diane Wakoski

  Thinking, Years, Interesting

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• Men endowed with a wild imagination should have, in addition, the great poetic faculty of denying our universe and its values so that they may act upon it with sovereign ease.

  Jean Genet

  Men, Should Have, Wild Imagination

  Jean Genet (1987). “Our Lady of the Flowers”, p.176, Grove Press

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