Poet Quotes - Page 8

• The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

  Oscar Wilde

  Book, Writing, Artist

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “Oscar Wilde The Dover Reader”, p.48, Courier Dover Publications

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• Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.

  Dudley Moore

  Drinking, Beer, Alcohol

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• A poet must discover that it’s his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed.

  Jim Harrison

  Stories, Truth Is, Ifs

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• The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Speak, Knows

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.213, Harvard University Press

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• I don't deny," he said, "that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, One Day, Strange

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• Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.

  Andre Breton

  Past, Two, Intellectual

  Andre Breton, Mark Polizzotti (1997). “Anthology of Black Humor”, p.113, City Lights Books

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• Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?

  J. G. Ballard

  Two, Dreamer, Realizing

  J. G. Ballard (2014). “The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard”, p.104, Holt Paperbacks

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• Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.

  W. H. Auden

  Children, Recipes, Neurosis

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• One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Unique, Stealing Things

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• The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.

  Seamus Heaney

  Effort, Community, Plies

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• We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2009). “Basic Writings of Nietzsche”, p.64, Modern Library

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• The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant.

  Denise Levertov

  Elements, Kind, Social

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• ...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Writing, Bed, Ears

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• It's interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls.

  Bohumil Hrabal

  Girl, Thinking, Interesting

  Bohumil Hrabal (2012). “Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age”, p.40, New York Review of Books

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• If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.

  Jean Cocteau

  Dream, Becoming, Ifs

  Jean Cocteau (1964). “The journals of Jean Cocteau”

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• The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

  Ted Hughes

  Pain, Voice, Trying

  Ted Hughes, Christopher Reid (2008). “Letters of Ted Hughes”, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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• If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved.

  Gregory Corso

  Believe, Saved, Ifs

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• a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Thinking, Capacity, Persons

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1951). “Speak, memory: a memoir”

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• The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

  William Faulkner

  Hope, Writing, Heart

  Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Stockholm, 10 Dec. 1950

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• If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.

  Walker Percy

  Suicide, Artist, Twenties

  Walker Percy (2011). “Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book”, p.65, Open Road Media

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• A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.

  Jay-Z

  Levels, Missions

  Jay-Z (2010). “Decoded (Enhanced Edition)”, p.70, Random House Group

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• What is a Poet? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.

  William Wordsworth

  Passion, Men, Soul

  William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth (1815). “Poems”, p.376

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• An anaesthetic is a poet-killer.

  Lewis Hyde

  Killers

  Lewis Hyde (1986). “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking”, Dallas Inst Humanities & Culture

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• Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line.

  Rollo May

  Lines, May, Assembly

  Rollo May (1994). “The Courage to Create”, p.69, W. W. Norton & Company

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• For Poesy alone can tell her dreams, With the fine spell of words alone can save Imagination from the sable charm And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say, ‘Thou art no Poet may’st not tell thy dreams?’ Since every man whose soul is not a clod Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved And been well nurtured in his mother tongue. Whether the dream now purpos’d to rehearse Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.

  John Keats

  Mother, Dream, Art

  John Keats (2015). “The Complete Poetry of John Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn + Ode to a Nightingale + Hyperion + Endymion + The Eve of St. Agnes + Isabella + Ode to Psyche + Lamia + Sonnets and more from one of the most beloved English Romantic poets”, p.758, e-artnow

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