Poet Quotes - Page 9

• Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.

  Czeslaw Milosz

  Mean, Expression, Style

  Czeslaw Milosz's Nobel Lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 8, 1980.

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• Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet's dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.

  Oscar Wilde

  Dream, Depressing, Reality

  "The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde".

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• The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none. A language must be found…of the soul, for the soul and will include everything: perfumes, sounds colors, thought grappling with thought

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Animal, Fire, Color

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• The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing?

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Writing, Opposites, Focus

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2009). “Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything”, p.30, Bloomsbury Publishing

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• In Irena’s head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, makes her sensual, and at the same time it dims her memory. She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at the same time the curtain of oblivion wraps her lewdness in an all-concealing darkness. As if a poet were writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Writing, Play

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• A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Needs, Alive, Wilderness

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• Instead of answering your question directly I shall quote from the Indian poet Tagore: “I slept and dreamt that life was joy/ I awoke and saw that life was service/I acted and behold, service was joy.” In fact, through my work I discover life, people, and everything which happens around us.

  Paulo Coelho

  People, Joy, Saws

  Paulo Coelho (2015). “Warrior of the Light -”, p.18, Booklassic

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• We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.

  Harold Bloom

  Loneliness, Fire, Light

  Harold Bloom (2011). “The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life”, p.10, Yale University Press

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• In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.

  William H. Gass

  Ambition, Thinking, Together

  "William Gass, The Art of Fiction No. 65". Interview with Thomas LeClair, www.theparisreview.org. Summer 1977.

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• The true poem is the poet's mind.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Poetry, Mind

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.244, Library of America

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• It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Night, Long, Community

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.168, Penguin

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• I had the title poet, and maybe I was one for a while. Also, the title singer was kindly accorded me, even though I could barely carry a tune.

  Leonard Cohen

  Titles, Tunes, Singers

  "Leonard Cohen On Poetry, Music And Why He Left The Zen Monastery". Interview with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. October 21, 2016.

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• Out of the thousands who are known or who want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes, hanging around the sacred precincts, trying to look like the real thing.

  Leonard Cohen

  Real, Two, Fake

  Leonard Cohen (2008). “Book of Longing”, p.73, McClelland & Stewart

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• I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.

  Leonard Cohen

  Writing, Giving, Use

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• A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Memories, Writing, Imagination

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1835). “Specimens of the table talk”, p.136

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