Poet Quotes - Page 14

• Poets, when they write of love, give themselves and everyone else away!

  Phyllis Bottome

  Writing, Giving

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• You must continue. Poets are the ones who change the world.

  Jackie Kennedy

  World, Changing The World

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• To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world.

  Maxine Kumin

  Writing, Odds, Hatred

  Maxine Kumin (2000). “Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry”

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• The Church has lost a great religious poet in me; but I have lost an infinity of fun in the church, so the loss is even.

  Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Religious, Fun, Loss

  Sylvia Townsend Warner, Claire Harman (1994). “The diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner”, Virago Pr

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• I will not go so far as to say, with a living poet, that the world knows nothing of its greatest men; but there are forms of greatness, or at least of excellence, which "die and make no sign"; there are martyrs that miss the palm, but not the stake; heroes without the laurel, and conquerors without the triumph.

  George Augustus Henry Sala

  Hero, Greatness, Men

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• The reason modern poetry is difficult is so that the poet's wife cannot understand it.

  Wendy Cope

  Wife, Poetry, Reason

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• What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.

  August Wilhelm von Schlegel

  Art, Portraits, Portraiture

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• Of all the arts the living of a life is perhaps the greatest; to live every moment of life with the same imaginative commitment as the poet brings to a special field.

  Kathleen Raine

  Art, Commitment, Special

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• A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing -- articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Writing, Long, Novelists

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• I am not just a lesbian. I am not just a poet. I am not just a mother. Honor the complexity of your vision and yourselves.

  Audre Lorde

  Mother, Honor, Vision

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• 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.

  Anna Wickham

  Suicide, Mistake, Profound

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• Who were my mentors in poetry and literature? This is a matter of opinion. Some see in my books the influences of authors whose names, in my ignorance, I have not even heard, while others see the influences of poets whose names I have heard but whose writings I have not read. And what is my opinion? From whom did I receive nurture? Not every man remembers the name of the cow which supplied him with each drop of milk he has drunk.

  Shmuel Yosef Agnon

  Book, Writing, Ignorance

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• There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said Truth is the daughter of Time.
  [Lat., Alius quidam veterum poetarum cuius nomen mihi nunc memoriae non est veritatem temporis filiam esse dixit.]

  Aulus Gellius

  Daughter, Truth, Names

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• 20th century poetry is a piñata. Images break from the earth when the poet strikes it.

  Diane Glancy

  Poetry, Earth, Break

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• Poetry examines an emotional truth. It's an experience filtered through the personality of the poet. We look to poetry for visions, not scientific truths. The poet's job is to combine new elements. Explore their melting, seeping into one another.

  Diane Glancy

  Jobs, Emotional, Poetry

  Diane Glancy (1996). “Claiming Breath”, p.83, U of Nebraska Press

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• poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of the world we carry within us.

  Vernon Lee

  Poetry, Mind, Depth

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• Five golden years, Heart of Mine, have we walked the way of life together, and there is not an hour I would have changed; there is no moment when I would have you other than you have been. It is the fashion these days, I know, to say that love ends at the altar, but it is not so. You and I have found the old dream of the world divinely true. It is neither a poet's fancy nor a trick of the imagination, but a thing of fadeless and unending beauty.

  Myrtle Reed

  Dream, Fashion, Heart

  Myrtle Reed (1906). “Later Love Letters of a Musician”

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• The fine gifts of temperament and imagination which are essential to the production of true poetry are often accompanied by morbid sensibility. The soul capable of ecstasy and transport must pay its price in suffering; he who walks upon the heights must sometimes grovel in the dust.

  Myrtle Reed

  Dust, Imagination, Soul

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• All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination. Even the richest, most surprising and wild imagination is not as rich, wild and surprising as reality. The task of the poet is to pick singular threads from this dense, colorful fabric.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Reality, Agreement, Wild Imagination

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• Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Littles, Common, Grind

  Wislawa Szymborska, Stanisław Barańczak, Clare Cavanagh (2000). “Poems, New and Collected, 1957-1997”, p.14, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• When I mention somebody, that doesn't necessarily mean that I identify with him, personally or poetically. I'm extremely happy when I encounter poets who are different than I am. The ones who have their own distinct poetics provide me with the greatest experiences.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Mean, Encounters, Different

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• A poem's life and death dependeth still
  Not on the poet's wits, but reader's will.

  Alexander Brome

  Life And Death, Wit, Reader

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• How can one express the indefinable sensations that one experiences while writing an instrumental composition that has no definite subject? It is a purely lyrical process. It is a musical confession of the soul, which unburdens itself through sounds just as a lyric poet expresses himself through poetry...As the poet Heine said, 'Where words leave off, music begins.'

  Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

  Music, Writing, Soul

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• I never have restricted myself into a frame of a particular technique. My techniques are determined simultaneously along with the subjects of my works. It is similar to the works of a poet, the form of a poem is determined at the same time as its content.

  Guity Novin

  Technique, Determined, Form

  Etelaat newspaper, Iran, June 07, 1973.

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• The poet, like the lover, is a person unable to reconcile what he knows with what he feels. His peculiarity is that he is under a certain compulsion to do so.

  Babette Deutsch

  Lovers, Certain, Compulsion

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