Poet Quotes - Page 19

• The most available example of how poetry works for a poet is yourself, and yet you'll probably be the last one to know exactly how you're serving the art and how the art is serving you.

  Wendell Berry

  Art, Example, Lasts

  "Singing to Keep the Mind Awake: Interview with Wendell Berry". Interview with Birkin Gilmore, poems.com. 2007.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet.

  Samuel Johnson

  Purpose, Defeat, Familiar

  Samuel Johnson (1825). “The Lives of the English Poets”, p.115

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists. There is, there has been, there will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem that they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous 'I don't know.'

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Jobs, Inspiration, Artist

  "The Poet and the World". Nobel Lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 07, 1996.

  47 Copy quote

  Show source

• I fell in love. It felt exactly like a fall, a head-over-heels tumble into a state of unbearable lightness. The earth tilted on its axis. I did not believe in romantic love at the time, thinking it a human construct, an invention of fourteenth century Italian poets. I was as unprepared for love as I had been for goodness and beauty. Suddenly, my heart seemed swollen, too large for my chest.

  Philip Yancey

  Fall, Believe, Heart

  Philip Yancey (1997). “What's So Amazing about Grace?”, p.41, Harper Collins

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.

  Loren Eiseley

  Artist, Musician, Great Art

  Loren Eiseley (2016). “The Night Country: A Library of America eBook Classic”, p.113, Library of America

  59 Copy quote

  Show source

• We could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words.

  Janet Frame

  Character, Thinking, World

  Janet Frame (1998). “The Complete Autobiography”, Womens PressLtd

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Plato found fault that the poets of his time filled the world with wrong opinions of the gods, making light tales of that unspotted essence, and therefore would not have the youth depraved with such opinions.

  Philip Sidney

  Plato, Light, Essence

  Sir Philip Sidney, Richard Bellings (1724). “The works of the Honourable Sr. Philip Sidney, kt. in prose and verse: In three volumes. ...”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My own journey in becoming a poet began with memory - with the need to record and hold on to what was being lost. One of my earliest poems, Give and Take, was about my Aunt Sugar, how I was losing her to her memory loss.

  Natasha Trethewey

  Memories, Loss, Aunt

  "PBS Newshour’s Poetry Series: Where Poetry Lives" by Jonterri Gadson, therumpus.net. September 13, 2013.

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, its their only elective, so this is their one shot. Theyll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.

  Robert Hass

  Giving, Want, Lectures

  4 Copy quote

• I intend 'Dämmerung' to be an ironic meditation on the financial rewards of poetry and a tragicomic lament on the passing of time and the changes in literary taste. The other poets mentioned are my poetic cohort from the U.K. I wrote the piece in situ, as it were, while making a television documentary about World War I in Germany.

  Simon Armitage

  War, Meditation, Ironic

  6 Copy quote

• Auden, who asked two things of an imagined world-that it be somehow like ours and somehow unlike-would be Ben Marcus's ideal reader, yet even without the poet's dire program, I am altogether taken by this hilarious and sexy alternative universe. Just imagine! it is all done with words instead of mirrors, so much more reliable and so much more heartbreaking. Thus Prospero enthralls his crew.

  Richard Howard

  Sexy, Taken, Mirrors

  4 Copy quote

• When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man.

  Albert Murray

  Men, Medicine, Swings

  Albert Murray (1970). “The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy”

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Prophets, mystics, poets, scientific discoverers are men whose lives are dominated by a vision; they are essentially solitary men . . . whose thoughts and emotions are not subject to the dominion of the herd.

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Vision, Dominion

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell”, p.337, Routledge

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Spring, Thinking, Knitting

  4 Copy quote

• Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.

  Aberjhani

  Art, Names, African American

  4 Copy quote

• The musician of disordered sound, the poet of decomposed language, the painter and sculptor of the fragmented visual and tactile world: they all portray the break up of the self and, through the rearrangement and reassemble of the fragments, try to create new structures that possess wholeness, perfection, new meaning.

  Heinz Kohut

  Self, Perfection, Trying

  75 Copy quote

• I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming out of the music world, the two of them.

  Clive Davis

  Views, Two, America

  "Clive Davis in No Spin Zone". "The O'Reilly Factor" with Bill O'Reilly, www.foxnews.com. March 07, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I do not want to be bored listening to music that is muffled and known only to the poet himself.

  F. Sionil José

  Bored, Listening, Want

  4 Copy quote

• Patricia Smith is one of the best poets around and has been for a long time. Her Blood Dazzler is full of capacious soul and formal inventiveness: the compassion and artfulness necessary to capture the tragedies and Tragedy of Katrina. Smith is herself a storm of beautiful, frightening talent. Her words will wash you or wash you away. I consider this new book a major literary event.

  Terrance Hayes

  Beautiful, Book, Compassion

  4 Copy quote

• [Shahrazad] had perused the books, annals and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples and instances of by gone men and things; indeed it was said that she had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments; and she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well read and well bred.

  Richard Francis Burton

  Wise, Witty, Art

  Richard Francis Burton, John Payne, Andrew Lang, Jonathan Scott (2015). “One Thousand and One Nights - Complete Arabian Nights Collection (Delphi Classics)”, p.4187, Delphi Classics

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The attention one gets from being a poet isnt great.

  Nick Flynn

  Attention

  4 Copy quote

• Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

  Marcel Proust

  Disappointment, Garden, Self

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way”, p.112, Modern Library

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Bob Moses, composer, drummer, poet, artist, conceptualizer, inspirer of people, has created a musical environment that is balanced between discipline and freedom, compositional design and spontaneous inspiration. A party with a purpose. This album is original, soulful, funny and very special. I hope a lot of people get as much enjoyment from it as I have.

  Gil Evans

  Inspiration, Party, Artist

  8 Copy quote

• Defeat furnishes good material to the poets and the artists, but none of us care to have the glory of the conquered apply to us.

  Susan Glaspell

  Artist, Care, Defeat

  Susan Glaspell (2008). “The Glory of the Conquered”, p.48, Wildside Press LLC

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Katherine Sedley was the only daughter and heiress to the libertine poet Sir Charles Sedley, and grew into a thoroughly scandalous lady in her own right.

  Susan Holloway Scott

  Daughter, Heiress, Grew

  7 Copy quote