Poet Quotes - Page 32

• Now that I have written many words,
  and let out so many loves, for so many,
  and been altogether what I always was
  a woman of excess, of zeal and greed,
  I find the effort useless.

  Anne Sexton

  Poetry, Effort, Greed

  Anne Sexton, “Cigarettes And Whiskey And Wild, Wild Women”

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• I am not lazy.
  I am on the amphetamine of the soul.
  I am, each day,
  typing out the God
  my typewriter believes in.

  Anne Sexton

  Believe, Typewriters, Poetry

  Anne Sexton, Diane Wood Middlebrook, Diana Hume George (2000). “Selected Poems of Anne Sexton”, p.238, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I tell it stories now and then
  and feed it images like honey.
  I will not speculate today
  with poems that think they're money.

  Anne Sexton

  Thinking, Poetry, Stories

  Anne Sexton (1978). “Words for Dr. Y.: uncollected poems with three stories”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

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• I was only sitting here in my white study
  with the awful black words pushing me around.

  Anne Sexton

  White, Poetry, Black

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• I said, the poets are there
  I hear them singing and lying
  around their round table
  and around me still.

  Anne Sexton

  Lying, Poetry, Singing

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• Poets are sitting in my kitchen.
  Why do these poets lie?
  Why do children get children and
  Did you hear what it said?

  Anne Sexton

  Children, Lying, Poetry

  Anne Sexton, “Portrait Of An Old Woman On The College Tavern Wall”

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• My business is words. Words are like labels,
  or coins, or better, like swarming bees.

  Anne Sexton

  Poetry, Labels, Coins

  Anne Sexton, Diane Wood Middlebrook, Diana Hume George (2000). “Selected Poems of Anne Sexton”, p.17, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• You must be a poet,
  a lady of evil luck
  desiring to be what you are not,
  longing to be
  what you can only visit.

  Anne Sexton

  Evil, Poetry, Luck

  Anne Sexton (1975). “The Awful Rowing Toward God”, Boston : Houghton Mifflin

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• Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths.

  Jane Austen

  Writing, People, Mouths

  Jane Austen, Deirdre Le Faye (2011). “Jane Austen's Letters”, p.289, Oxford University Press

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• Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

  Ezra Pound

  Art, Poetry, Sound

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• In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.

  Ezra Pound

  Poetry, Elements, Likes

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• If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Writing, Hands, Choices

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• That the mere matter of a poem, for instance--its subject, its given incidents or situation; that the mere matter of a picture--the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape--should be nothing without the form, the spirit of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter;Mthis is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.

  Walter Pater

  Art, Poetry, Unity

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• The difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations. The poet avoids the entire vocabulary of logic unless for satiric purposes, and treats words as living creatures with a preference for those with long emotional histories dating from mediaeval times. Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic.

  Robert Graves

  Simple, Emotional, Differences

  Robert Graves, Patrick J. Quinn (2000). “Some speculations on literature, history, and religion”, Carcanet Press Ltd.

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• Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to laya train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible!

  Henry James

  Simple, Race, Poetry

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• Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Solitude, Crowds, Equal

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• Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spite of madness.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Poetry, Excellence, Madness

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• The only refuge left to us was the poet's ivory tower, which we climbed, ever higher, to isolate ourselves from the mob.

  Gerard De Nerval

  Ivory Tower, Towers, Higher

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• A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through to the big time and become failed novelists.

  Gary Reilly

  Moving, Artist, Break Through

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• Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,
  Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,
  Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.

  Edwin Arlington Robinson

  Time, Kings, Years

  Edwin Arlington Robinson (2015). “Delphi Poetical Works and Plays of Edwin Arlington Robinson (Illustrated)”, p.111, Delphi Classics

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• Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anesthetic: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression--a kind of rudimentary theater--as do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means.

  John Barth

  Art, Mean, Men

  John Barth (1984). “The Friday book: essays and other nonfiction”, Putnam Pub Group

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• It is an evil world. The fires of hatred and violence burn fiercely. Evil is powerful, the devil covers a darkened earth with hisblack wings. And soon the end of the world is expected. But mankind does not repent, the church struggles, and the preachers and poets warn and lament in vain.

  Johan Huizinga

  Powerful, Struggle, Fire

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• Goodbye,
  you who are, for me, the postmarks again
  of shattered towns--Xenia, Burnt Cabins,
  Hornell--
  their loneliness
  given away in poems, only their solitude kept.

  Galway Kinnell

  Goodbye, War, Loneliness

  Galway Kinnell, “The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye To His Poetry Students”

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• Look at this poet William Carlos Williams: he is primitive and native, and his roots are in raw forest and violent places; he is word-sick and place-crazy. He admires strength, but for what? Violence! This is the cult of the frontier mind.

  Edward Dahlberg

  Strength, Crazy, Roots

  Edward Dahlberg (1967). “Alms for Oblivion”, U of Minnesota Press

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• The great charm of poetry consists in lively pictures of the sublime passions, magnanimity, courage, disdain of fortune; or thoseof the tender affections, love and friendship; which warm the heart, and diffuse over it similar sentiments and emotions.

  David Hume

  Heart, Passion, Poetry

  David Hume (1758). “Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects”, p.453

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