Poet Quotes - Page 24

• Can you remember? when we thought
  the poets taught how to live?

  Adrienne Rich

  Life, Poetry, Taught

  Adrienne Rich (1993). “Your Native Land, Your Life”, p.50, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity.

  Adrienne Rich

  Notebook, Prayer, Memories

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.98, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Iambics march from short to long;--
  With a leap and a bound the swift Anapaests throng

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Long, Poetry, March

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1997). “Selected Poetry”, Oxford University Press, USA

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The definition of good prose is proper words in their proper places; of good verse, the most proper words in their proper places.The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Poetry, Attention, Definitions

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1835). “Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge: In Two Volumes”, p.214

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• A bard whom there were none to praise,
  And very few to read.

  Hartley Coleridge

  Poetry, Obscurity, Praise

  5 Copy quote

• The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E.E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off andon for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry lovers.

  John Dos Passos

  Men, Pie, Ice Cream

  9 Copy quote

• I have no connections here; only gusty collisions,
  rootless seedlings forced into bloom, that collapse.
  ...
  I am the Visiting Poet: a real unicorn,
  a wind-up plush dodo, a wax museum of the Movement.
  People want to push the buttons and see me glow.

  Marge Piercy

  Travel, Real, War

  6 Copy quote

• How poetry comes to the poet is a mystery.

  John Lennon

  Poetry, Mystery

  4 Copy quote

• This is not a time to keep the facts from the people-to keep them complacent. To sound the alarm is not to panic but to seek action from an aroused public. For, as the poet Dante once said: 'The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

  John F. Kennedy

  People, Neutrality, Panic

  Speech, Tulsa, Okla., 16 Sept. 1959 (printed in John F. Kennedy, The Strategy of Peace, ed. Allan Nevins [1960]).

  138 Copy quote

  Show source

• How wide is all this long pretense!
  There is in love a sweetness ready penned,
  Copy out only that, and save expense.

  George Herbert

  Long, Poetry, Sweetness

  George Herbert (1871). “The English poems of George Herbert, together with his collection of proverbs entitled Jacula prudentum”, p.103

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I envy no man's nightingale or spring;
  Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme,
  Who plainly say, My God, My King.

  George Herbert

  Kings, Spring, Loss

  George Herbert, Christopher Harvey, George Gilfillan (1857). “The poetical works of George Herbert”, p.52

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• POET
  If not in a place, where are the People weeping?
  LIBERAL
  They creep weeping in the face, not place.
  POET
  Is it something with which we may cope
  The weeping, the creeping, the peepee-ing, the peeping?

  Allen Tate

  People, May, Faces

  Allen Tate (1947). “Poems, 1920-1945: A Selection”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Novelists have to love humanity to write anything worthwhile. Poets have to love themselves.

  Marita Golden

  Writing, Humanity, Novelists

  6 Copy quote

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

  Phyllis Bottome

  Writing, Giving

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered.

  Anais Nin

  Science, Scientist, Unison

  4 Copy quote

• Subtract from many modern poets all that may be found in Shakespeare, and trash will remain.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  May, Modern, Trash

  Charles Caleb Colton (1821). “Lacon: or, Many things in few words”, p.214

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life?

  Charles Dickens

  Inspiration, Heart, Humility

  Charles Dickens (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Charles Dickens (Illustrated)”, p.17059, Delphi Classics

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to the atheist, it is immortality to the poet!

  Ouida

  Death, Atheist, Oblivion

  Ouida (2016). “Wisdom, Wit and Pathos of Ouida”, p.92, Ouida

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.

  Honore de Balzac

  Men, Wife, Irises

  11 Copy quote

• As poets, we're writing into the void, and we're not writing to be bestsellers. Whatever individual responses we get, whether at a reading, by a conversation or a letter, mean the world.

  Mary Jo Salter

  Reading, Writing, Mean

  4 Copy quote

• Poets and men of action differ: the former yield to their feelings in order to reproduce them in lively colors, and therefore judge only ex post facto; the latter feel and judge at one and the same time.

  Honore de Balzac

  Men, Yield, Order

  4 Copy quote

• God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven.

  Honore de Balzac

  Life, Drama, Men

  21 Copy quote

• The poet is always our contemporary.

  Virginia Woolf

  Contemporary

  Virginia Woolf (2009). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1929-1932”, Chatto & Windus

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.

  Virginia Woolf

  Problem, Lays, Biographers

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4047, Delphi Classics

  5 Copy quote

  Show source