Poet Quotes - Page 13

• Modern storytellers are the descendants of an immense and ancient community of holy people, troubadours, bards, griots, cantadoras, cantors, traveling poets, bums, hags and crazy people.

  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

  Crazy, People, Community

  13 Copy quote

• A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him.

  Stanley Kunitz

  Needs, Alive, Wilderness

  5 Copy quote

• The prose poem Walk The Red Road is great stuff and deserves to be read aloud. It compares quite favorably to The Walls Of Emerald by Li Chiang Yen, a Chinese poet of the late Tang period.

  Brian Aldiss

  Wall, Chinese, Emeralds

  4 Copy quote

• When you depart from standard usage, it should be deliberate and not an accidental lapse. Like a poet who breaks the rules of poetry for creative effect, this only works when you know and respect the rule you are breaking. If you have never heard of the rules you are breaking, you have no right to do so, and you are likely to come off like a buffoon or a barbarian. Breaking rules, using slang and archaic language can be effective, but it is just as likely to give you an audience busy with wincing.

  N.D. Wilson

  Giving, Creative, Lapses

  5 Copy quote

• A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.

  Wallace Stevens

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination”, p.32, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think that in the process of writing, all kinds of unexpected things happen that shift the poet away from his plan and that these accidents are really what we mean when we talk about poetry.

  John Ashbery

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

  21 Copy quote

• A cook is creative, marrying ingredients in the way a poet marries words.

  Roger Verge

  Food, Creative, Cooking

  6 Copy quote

• The poet's perspective of life, the musician's sense of harmony, the artist's eye of proportion and relationships ~ these are all shared by healers, especially the herbal healer who works with plants, which are the pure creative expression of nature and the healing process.

  Michael Tierra

  Healing, Eye, Artist

  4 Copy quote

• We ask the poet: 'What subject have you chosen?' instead of: 'What subject has chosen you?

  Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

  Chosen, Subjects, Asks

  7 Copy quote

• Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but, all unwept and unknown, are lost in the distant night, since they are without a divine poet (to chronicle their deeds).

  Horace

  Night, Men, Bravery

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 82-83, Odes, Book IV, IX. 25, 1922.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mediocrity is not allowed to poets, either by the gods or men.

  Horace

  Men, Mediocrity

  11 Copy quote

• Neither men, nor gods, nor booksellers' shelves permit ordinary poets to exist.
  [Lat., Mediocribus esse poetis
  Non homines, non di, non concessere columnae.]

  Horace

  Men, Ordinary, Permit

  4 Copy quote

• If you rank me with the lyric poets, my exalted head shall strike the stars.
  [Lat., Quod si me lyricis vatibus inseris,
  Sublimi feriam sidera vertice.]

  Horace

  Stars, Strikes, Ifs

  4 Copy quote

• Poets, the first instructors of mankind,
  Brought all things to the proper native use.

  Horace

  Use, Firsts, Mankind

  4 Copy quote

• The man is either mad or his is making verses.
  [Lat., Aut insanit homo, aut versus facit.]

  Horace

  Men, Mad, He Man

  4 Copy quote

• I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face!

  George Eliot

  Ciphers, Faces, Unwritten

  George Eliot (1863). “Romola”, p.107

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Virtue is as little to be acquired by learning as genius; nay, the idea is barren, and is only to be employed as an instrument, in the same way as genius in respect to art. It would be as foolish to expect that our moral and ethical systems would turn out virtuous, noble, and holy beings, as that our aesthetic systems would produce poets, painters, and musicians.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Art, Ideas, Musician

  8 Copy quote

• Whoever would understand the poet
  Must go into the poet's country.
  [Ger., Wer den Dichter will verstehen
  Muss in Dichters Lande gehen.]

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Country, Dens

  4 Copy quote

• Modern poets mix too much water with their ink.
  [Ger., Neuere Poeten thun viel Wasser in die Tinte.]

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Water, Ink, Too Much

  4 Copy quote

• Rash combat oft immortalizes man; if he should fall, he is renowned in song; but after-ages reckon not the ceaseless tears which the forsaken woman sheds. Poets tell us not of the many nights consumed in weeping, or of the dreary days wherein her anguished soul vainly yearns to call her loved one back.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Song, Fall, Night

  7 Copy quote

• Shakespeare is dangerous to young poets; they cannot but reproduce him, while they fancy that they produce themselves.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Fancy, Produce, Young

  4 Copy quote

• You admire, Vacerra, only the poets of old and praise only those who are dead. Pardon me, I beseech you, Vacerra, if I think death too high a price to pay for your praise.

  Martial

  Thinking, Pay, Praise

  Martial (1871). “The Epigrams of Martial”, p.384

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.

  Edith Sitwell

  Lying, Book, Giving

  4 Copy quote

• The poet is the complete lover of mankind.

  Edith Sitwell

  Lovers, Mankind

  4 Copy quote

• The reason why Matthew Arnold, to my feeling, fails entirely as a poet (though no doubt his ideas were good - at least, I am told they were) is that he had no sense of touch whatsoever. Nothing made any impression on his skin. He could feel neither the shape nor the texture of a poem with his hands.

  Edith Sitwell

  Ideas, Hands, Feelings

  Edith Sitwell (Dame) (1930). “Ser. Milton and the Augustan Age”

  5 Copy quote

  Show source