Poet Quotes - Page 11

• There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, 'Truth is the daughter of Time.'

  Abraham Lincoln

  Daughter, Mother, Truth

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• The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value; hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if they were candidates for a prize.

  C. S. Lewis

  Order, Two, Mind

  C. S. Lewis (1971). “The Four Loves”, p.24, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Rumi, who is one of the greatest Persian poets, said that the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.

  Mohsen Makhmalbaf

  Mirrors, Hands, Pieces

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.

  Henry Miller

  Moving, Differences, Evil

  Henry Miller (1961). “The Cosmological Eye”, p.183, New Directions Publishing

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• A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.

  Henry Moore

  Art, Shapes, Musician

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• Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

  Robert Morgan

  Writing, Southern, Narrative

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• Dante Alighieri was not only a Christian poet or a priest, he was a man. He was a real poet. We can understand that the goal of Divine Comedy is beauty. You don't need also to understand Italian or to know Italian, because when Dante's writing, when we recite Dante out loud, it explodes a cosmos of illumination like to recite music, a symphony.

  Roberto Benigni

  Christian, Real, Writing

  Source: film.avclub.com

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• I think one of the most fertile, unexplored areas for poets and fiction writers is the world of science. I become overwhelmed by the science world.

  Louise Erdrich

  Thinking, World, Overwhelmed

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Artist, Musician, Invisible

  Irma A. Richter (ed.) 'Selections from the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci' (World's Classics, 1952) p. 198

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• I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

  Alice Walker

  Writing, Novel, Feels

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• A nation's poets are its true owners; and by the stroke of the pen they convey the title-deeds of its real possessions to strangers and aliens.

  George Edward Woodberry

  Real, Titles, Deeds

  George Edward Woodberry (1920). “The Torch, and Other Lectures and Addresses”

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• The poet craves emotion, and feeds the fire that consumes him, and only under this condition is he baptized with creative power.

  George Edward Woodberry

  Fire, Creative, Emotion

  George Edward Woodberry (1920). “Collected Essays: The torch and other lectures and addresses”

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• Much of a poet's experience takes place in imagination only; the life he tells is oftenest the life that he strongly desires to live, and the power, the purity and height of his utterance may not seldom be the greater because experience here uses the voices of desire.

  George Edward Woodberry

  Voice, Imagination, Desire

  George Edward Woodberry (1920). “Collected Essays: The torch and other lectures and addresses”

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• The Greeks, those originators of the intellectual life, fixed for us the idea of the poet. He was a divine man; more sacred than the priest, who was at best an intermediary between men and the gods, but in the poet the god was present and spoke.

  George Edward Woodberry

  Men, Origin Of Life, Ideas

  George Edward Woodberry (1920). “The Torch, and Other Lectures and Addresses”

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• The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.

  Virginia Woolf

  Essence, Giving, Mind

  "The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1918-1924".

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• I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.

  William Butler Yeats

  Truth, War, Thinking

  William Butler Yeats (2011). “Selected Poems And Four Plays”, p.66, Simon and Schuster

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• I hear poets complaining: 'We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that.'

  Felix Dennis

  Complaining, Radio, Faces

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• The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.

  A. R. Ammons

  Risk, Said, Assurance

  A. R. Ammons (1996). “Set in motion: essays, interviews, and dialogues”, Univ of Michigan Pr

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• Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

  Margaret Atwood

  Echoes, Lines, Favors

  Margaret Atwood (2006). “Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood”

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• But the lover's power is the poet's power. He can make love from all the common strings with which this world is strung.

  Amelia Barr

  Alaska, Making Love, World

  Amelia E. Barr (2009). “The Belle of Bowling Green”, p.61, Wildside Press LLC

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• To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.

  Robert E. Sherwood

  Liars, Lying, Writing

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• No man can be explained by his personal history, least of all a poet.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Men, Personal History

  Katherine Anne Porter (2008). “Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings”, p.781, Library of America

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• I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Believe, Teaching, School

  "Why Schools Don't Educate". John Taylor Gatto's New York City Teacher of the Year Acceptance Speech, www.naturalchild.org. January 31, 1990.

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• The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative.

  Edward Hirsch

  Character, Attention, Narrative

  Source: bigthink.com

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• When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry. And the reason for that is because the fiction writers seemed to need to learn how to pay greater attention to language itself, to the way that language works.

  Edward Hirsch

  Writing, Creative, Taught

  Big Think interview, bigthink.com.

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