Poet Quotes - Page 11

• The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Artist, Musician, Invisible

  Irma A. Richter (ed.) 'Selections from the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci' (World's Classics, 1952) p. 198

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• I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

  Alice Walker

  Writing, Novel, Feels

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• A nation's poets are its true owners; and by the stroke of the pen they convey the title-deeds of its real possessions to strangers and aliens.

  George Edward Woodberry

  Real, Titles, Deeds

  George Edward Woodberry (1920). “The Torch, and Other Lectures and Addresses”

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• The poet craves emotion, and feeds the fire that consumes him, and only under this condition is he baptized with creative power.

  George Edward Woodberry

  Fire, Creative, Emotion

  George Edward Woodberry (1920). “Collected Essays: The torch and other lectures and addresses”

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• Much of a poet's experience takes place in imagination only; the life he tells is oftenest the life that he strongly desires to live, and the power, the purity and height of his utterance may not seldom be the greater because experience here uses the voices of desire.

  George Edward Woodberry

  Voice, Imagination, Desire

  George Edward Woodberry (1920). “Collected Essays: The torch and other lectures and addresses”

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• The Greeks, those originators of the intellectual life, fixed for us the idea of the poet. He was a divine man; more sacred than the priest, who was at best an intermediary between men and the gods, but in the poet the god was present and spoke.

  George Edward Woodberry

  Men, Origin Of Life, Ideas

  George Edward Woodberry (1920). “The Torch, and Other Lectures and Addresses”

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• The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.

  Virginia Woolf

  Essence, Giving, Mind

  "The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1918-1924".

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• I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.

  William Butler Yeats

  Truth, War, Thinking

  William Butler Yeats (2011). “Selected Poems And Four Plays”, p.66, Simon and Schuster

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• I hear poets complaining: 'We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that.'

  Felix Dennis

  Complaining, Radio, Faces

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• The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value; hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if they were candidates for a prize.

  C. S. Lewis

  Order, Two, Mind

  C. S. Lewis (1971). “The Four Loves”, p.24, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Dante Alighieri was not only a Christian poet or a priest, he was a man. He was a real poet. We can understand that the goal of Divine Comedy is beauty. You don't need also to understand Italian or to know Italian, because when Dante's writing, when we recite Dante out loud, it explodes a cosmos of illumination like to recite music, a symphony.

  Roberto Benigni

  Christian, Real, Writing

  Source: film.avclub.com

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• I'm an old guy, and I was protesting during the Vietnam War. We killed fifty Asians for every loyal American. Every artist worth a damn in this country was terribly opposed to that war, finally, when it became evident what a fiasco and meaningless butchery it was. We formed sort of a laser beam of protest. Every painter, every writer, every stand-up comedian, every composer, every novelist, every poet aimed in the same direction. Afterwards, the power of this incredible new weapon dissipated.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Country, War, Artist

  Source: www.sharedhost.progressive.org

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• I tend to like the way poets form communities. Writing can be lonely after all. Modern life can be lonely. Poets do seem to be more social than fiction writers. This could be because of poetry's roots in the oral tradition - poetry is read aloud and even performed. I'm just speculating, of course. At any rate, because poets form these groups, they learn from one another. That is one of the best things about being a poet.

  Rae Armantrout

  Lonely, Writing, Community

  Source: therumpus.net

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• People probably long for something genuinely personal in a society where the personal is often indistinguishable from the "personalized." Maybe the poetry audience member is searching for his or her own "personal space" and they expect the poet to be a sort of avatar of the private life. But that sort of representation is distasteful to me. Asking a poet to represent the personal life is, paradoxically, to turn the poet into something other than a person.

  Rae Armantrout

  Long, People, Personal Space

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I'm old-fashioned enough to really still believe that the poem is an object to be memorized, venerated... I still believe in that kind of poem. A lot of poets today don't, they want to get away from the poem as object. They want something looser. Unfortunately, a lot of it is boring to me.

  Jonathan W. Galassi

  Believe, Today, Kind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• My path to poetry was slow and meandering. When I eventually found my way to graduate school at 29, making a life as a poet seemed like a bohemian fantasy. But maybe my zigzagging trajectory is just an excuse for tardiness, when fear is really the root of any reason I might give. My perfectionism and pace are certainly driven by fear that a poem is imperfect or incomplete. More significantly, my struggle to fully dedicate myself to poetry was a fear of failure.

  Robin Beth Schaer

  Struggle, School, Giving

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I think one of the most fertile, unexplored areas for poets and fiction writers is the world of science. I become overwhelmed by the science world.

  Louise Erdrich

  Thinking, World, Overwhelmed

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.

  A. R. Ammons

  Risk, Said, Assurance

  A. R. Ammons (1996). “Set in motion: essays, interviews, and dialogues”, Univ of Michigan Pr

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• Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

  Margaret Atwood

  Echoes, Lines, Favors

  Margaret Atwood (2006). “Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood”

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• But the lover's power is the poet's power. He can make love from all the common strings with which this world is strung.

  Amelia Barr

  Alaska, Making Love, World

  Amelia E. Barr (2009). “The Belle of Bowling Green”, p.61, Wildside Press LLC

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• To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.

  Robert E. Sherwood

  Liars, Lying, Writing

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• No man can be explained by his personal history, least of all a poet.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Men, Personal History

  Katherine Anne Porter (2008). “Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings”, p.781, Library of America

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• I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Believe, Teaching, School

  "Why Schools Don't Educate". John Taylor Gatto's New York City Teacher of the Year Acceptance Speech, www.naturalchild.org. January 31, 1990.

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• Poetry is the sister of Sorrow. Every man that suffers and weeps is a poet; every tear is a verse, and every heart a poem.

  Marc-Andre Fleury

  Heart, Men, Poetry

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• a. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Book, People, Literature

  Cynthia Ozick (1966). “Trust”

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