Poet Quotes - Page 25

• 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

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• We are born poets. we become orators.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Born, Orators

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• Truth is far and flat, and fancy is fiery; and truth is cold, and people feel the cold, and they may wrap themselves against it in fancies that are fiery, but they should not call them facts; and, generally, poets do not; they are shrewd, they feel the cold, too, but they know a hawk from a handsaw, a fact from a fancy, as none knows better.

  Stevie Smith

  People, May, Fancy

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

  Phyllis Bottome

  Writing, Giving

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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Academia is a graveyard of poets.

  Kathleen Raine

  Academia, Graveyard

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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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• 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 can Perswade more Powerfully than Poets?

  Margaret Cavendish

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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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• Of little use, the man you may suppose,
  Who says in verse what others say in prose;
  Yet let me show a poet's of some weight,
  And (though no soldier) useful to the state,
  What will a child learn sooner than a song?
  What better teach a foreigner the tongue?
  What's long or short, each accent where to place
  And speak in public with some sort of grace?

  Alexander Pope

  Song, Children, Men

  Alexander Pope (1829). “An Essay on Man: And Other Poems”, p.156

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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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• Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it's much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they're attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Believe, Never Quit, Faults

  Wislawa Szymborska, Stanisław Barańczak, Clare Cavanagh (2000). “Poems, New and Collected, 1957-1997”, p.13, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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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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• Whatever is genuine in social relations endures, despite of time, error, absence, and destiny; and that which has no inherent vitality had better die at once. A great poet has truly declared that constancy is no virtue, but a fact.

  Henry Theodore Tuckerman

  Destiny, Errors, Facts

  Henry Theodore Tuckerman (1850). “The optimist”, p.126

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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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• other artists - poets, painters, sculptors, musicians - produce something which lives after them and enshrines their memories in positive evidences of their divine mission; but we, - we strut and fret our hour upon the stage, and then the curtain falls and all is darkness and silence.

  Charlotte Saunders Cushman

  Memories, Fall, Artist

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• Honor to the idealists, whether philosophers or poets. They have improved us by mingling with our daily pursuits great and transcendent conceptions. They have thrown around our sensual life the grandeur of a better, and drawn us up from contacts with the temporal and the selfish to communion with beauty and truth and goodness.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Selfish, Sensual, Honor

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