Poet Quotes - Page 24

• When clever people ask me where
  I get a poem, I despair.

  Robert Frost

  Clever, People, Poetry

  Robert Frost (1971). “The poetry of Robert Frost”

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• Before now poetry has taken notice
  Of wars, and what are wars but politics
  Transformed from chronic to acute and bloody?

  Robert Frost

  War, Taken, Poetry

  Robert Frost (1955). “Selected poems”

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• Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspectthey differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields.

  Robert Frost

  Book, Artist, Annoyed

  "The Figure a Poem Makes". Essay by Robert Frost, 1939.

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• For the poets tell us, don't they, that the melodies they bring us are gathered from rills that run with honey, out of glens and gardens of the Muses, and they bring them as bees do honey, flying like the bees? And what they say is true, for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him. So long as he has this in his possession, no man is able to make poetry or to chant in prophecy.

  Plato

  Inspirational, Running, Men

  Plato (1963). “The Collected Dialogues of Plato: Including The Letters”, Bollingen

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• They (the poets) are to us in a manner the fathers and authors of the wisdom.

  Plato

  Wisdom, Father, Poetry

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• The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

  George Orwell

  Water, Poetry, Literature

  The Road toWigan Pier ch. 11 (1937)

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• Prophetic utterance, like poetic utterance, transforms experience and moves the receiver to new attitudes. The kinds of experience--the recognitions or revelations--out of which both prophecy and poetry emerge, are such as to stir the prophet or poet to speech that may exceed their own known capacities; they are "inspired," they breathe in revelation and breathe out new words; and by so doing they transfer over to the listener or reader a parallel experience, a parallel intensity, which impels that person into new attitudes and new actions.

  Denise Levertov

  Attitude, Moving, Poetry

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• We have the words in our pockets,
  obscure directions. The old ones
  have taken away the light of their presence.

  Denise Levertov

  Taken, Light, Poetry

  Denise Levertov (2003). “Selected Poems”, p.34, New Directions Publishing

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• At Delphi I prayed
  to Apollo
  that he maintain in me
  the flame of the poem
  and I drank of the brackish
  spring there.

  Denise Levertov

  Prayer, Spring, Flames

  Denise Levertov (1983). “Poems of Denise Levertov, 1960-1967”, p.140, New Directions Publishing

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• For nothing keeps a poet
  In his high singing mood
  Like unappeasable hunger
  For unattainable food.

  Joyce Kilmer

  Singing, Unattainable, Hunger

  Joyce Kilmer (1968). “Joyce Kilmer: Memoir and poems”

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• ... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Baby, Art, Sex

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• Citizen's Band radio renders one accessible to a wide variety of people from all walks of life. It should not be forgotten that all walks of life include conceptual artists, dry cleaners, and living poets.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Artist, People, Citizens

  Fran Lebowitz (1994). “The Fran Lebowitz Reader”, Vintage

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• A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.

  Aristotle

  Truth, History, Giving

  Aristotle, Longinus, Demetrius (of Phaleron) (1932). “The poetics”

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• For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud--and it is here above allthat exceptions prove the rule--that everything that exists in nature exists in art.

  Victor Hugo

  Art, Poetry, Harmony

  Victor Hugo (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Victor Hugo (Illustrated)”, p.12470, Delphi Classics

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• Poetry contains philosophy as the soul contains reason.

  Victor Hugo

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Poetry

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• The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Real, Poetry

  Oscar Wilde (1969). “The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde”, p.15, University of Chicago Press

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• Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.

  Oscar Wilde

  Drunk, Poetry, Personality

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• Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.

  Oscar Wilde

  Lakes, Poetry, Stones

  Oscar Wilde, Alvin Redman (1959). “The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde”, p.77, Courier Corporation

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• There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate--not to the artist but to the public.... Without them we would judge a man simply by his work; but at present the newspapers are trying hard to induce the public to judge a sculptor, for instance, never by his statues but by the way he treats his wife; a painter by the amount of his income and a poet by the colour of his necktie.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Writing, Men

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.648, GENERAL PRESS

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• In autumn, when the leaves are brown,
  Take pen and ink, and write it down.

  Lewis Carroll

  Writing, Autumn, Poetry

  Lewis Carroll (2016). “Through the Looking-Glass”, p.51, Xist Publishing

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• Unhappie Verse, the witnesse of my unhappie state,
  Make thy selfe fluttring wings of thy fast flying
  Thought

  Edmund Spenser

  Wings, Poetry, Flying

  Edmund Spenser, Henry John Todd (1859). “The Works of Edmund Spenser: With a Selection of Notes from Various Commentators; and a Glossarial Index: to which is Prefixed, Some Account of the Life of Spenser”, p.15

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• I have never injured anybody with a mordant poem; my
  verse contains charges against nobody. Ingenuous, I have
  shunned wit steeped in venom--not a letter of mine is dipped
  in poisonous jest.

  Ovid

  Poetry, Letters, Jest

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• Ovid lies here, the poet, skilled in love's gentle sport;
  By his own talents he worked his undoing.
  Oh, you who pass by, if ever you have loved,
  Think it not a burden to wish him calm repose.

  Ovid

  Love, Sports, Lying

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• Science is a capital or fund perpetually reinvested; it accumulates, rolls up, is carried forward by every new man. Every man of science has all the science before him to go upon, to set himself up in business with. What an enormous sum Darwin availed himself of and reinvested! Not so in literature; to every poet, to every artist, it is still the first day of creation, so far as the essentials of his task are concerned. Literature is not so much a fund to be reinvested as it is a crop to be ever new-grown.

  John Burroughs

  Art, Science, Men

  John Burroughs (1905). “The Writings of John Burroughs”

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• ... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence.

  May Sarton

  Self, Class, Two

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