Poet Quotes - Page 15

• The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.

  Barbara Tuchman

  People, History, Poetry

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• Tis a question whether adversity or prosperity makes the most poets.

  George Farquhar

  Adversity, Prosperity

  George Farquhar (1736). “The twin-rivals: A comedy. : As it is acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane: by her Majesty's servants”, p.81

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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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• Poetry and preaching do not go well together; when the preacher mounts the pulpit the poet usually goes away.

  Edith Hamilton

  Poetry, Together, Pulpit

  Edith Hamilton (1957). “The Roman Way to Western Civilization”

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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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• Poems reveal secrets when they are analyzed. The poet's pleasure in finding ingenious ways to enclose her secrets should be matched by the reader's pleasure in unlocking and revealing these secrets.

  Diane Wakoski

  Secret, Unlocking, Way

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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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• 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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• For me, a poet is someone who is 'in contact.' Someone through whom a current is passing.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Passing, Currents, Contact

  Marguerite Yourcenar, Matthieu Galey (1984). “With Open Eyes: Conversations with Matthieu Galey”, Boston : Beacon Press

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• Academia is a graveyard of poets.

  Kathleen Raine

  Academia, Graveyard

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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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• It was not the purpose of poetry to record anything and everything, to merely describe either the outer world or some subjective mood, but to speak from the imagination of the poet to the imagination of the reader.

  Kathleen Raine

  Imagination, Purpose, Records

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• I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.

  Audre Lorde

  Mother, Warrior, Feminist

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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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• If you know much about your work - why you work, how you work, your aims - you are probably not a poet.

  Mary Webb

  Aim, Knows, Ifs

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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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• who can Perswade more Powerfully than Poets?

  Margaret Cavendish

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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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