Poet Quotes - Page 27

• Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing
  with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring
  with replacing the noun. It is doing that always
  doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that.
  Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and
  pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is
  what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no
  matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a
  great many kinds of poetry.

  Gertrude Stein

  Poetry, Doe, Nouns

  Gertrude Stein (1998). “Writings, 1903-1932: Q.E.D., Three lives, Portraits and other short works, The autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I said.
  A rose is a rose is a rose.
  And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what
  did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed
  a noun.

  Gertrude Stein

  Rose, Poetry, Nouns

  Gertrude Stein (2012). “Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein”, p.22, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths.

  Jane Austen

  Writing, People, Mouths

  Jane Austen, Deirdre Le Faye (2011). “Jane Austen's Letters”, p.289, Oxford University Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

  Ezra Pound

  Art, Poetry, Sound

  8 Copy quote

• In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities; I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality--the principle of order versus the split atom.

  Ezra Pound

  Order, Ideas, Rose

  4 Copy quote

• In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.

  Ezra Pound

  Poetry, Elements, Likes

  17 Copy quote

• If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Writing, Hands, Choices

  4 Copy quote

• Poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common thingsor it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth.

  Walter Pater

  Eye, Creativity, Exercise

  7 Copy quote

• That the mere matter of a poem, for instance--its subject, its given incidents or situation; that the mere matter of a picture--the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape--should be nothing without the form, the spirit of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter;Mthis is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.

  Walter Pater

  Art, Poetry, Unity

  4 Copy quote

• The difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations. The poet avoids the entire vocabulary of logic unless for satiric purposes, and treats words as living creatures with a preference for those with long emotional histories dating from mediaeval times. Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic.

  Robert Graves

  Simple, Emotional, Differences

  Robert Graves, Patrick J. Quinn (2000). “Some speculations on literature, history, and religion”, Carcanet Press Ltd.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

  Robert Graves

  Hands, Poetry, Trying

  "Ten key things about... poetry" by Dorota Nosowicz, www.theguardian.com. October 1, 2000.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to laya train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible!

  Henry James

  Simple, Race, Poetry

  4 Copy quote

• Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Solitude, Crowds, Equal

  10 Copy quote

• All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.

  Samuel Beckett

  Prayer, Poetry, Paradigm

  Samuel Beckett (2013). “Selected Poems 1930-1988”, p.10, Faber & Faber

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disembodiment of the spiritual; Poetry is all passionate and feeling and animates the inanimate; Metaphysics are most perfect when concerned with universals; Poetry, when most concerned with particulars.

  Samuel Beckett

  Spiritual, Philosophical, Perfect

  5 Copy quote

• Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spite of madness.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Poetry, Excellence, Madness

  4 Copy quote

• The only refuge left to us was the poet's ivory tower, which we climbed, ever higher, to isolate ourselves from the mob.

  Gerard De Nerval

  Ivory Tower, Towers, Higher

  7 Copy quote

• A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through to the big time and become failed novelists.

  Gary Reilly

  Moving, Artist, Break Through

  4 Copy quote

• Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,
  Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,
  Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.

  Edwin Arlington Robinson

  Time, Kings, Years

  Edwin Arlington Robinson (2015). “Delphi Poetical Works and Plays of Edwin Arlington Robinson (Illustrated)”, p.111, Delphi Classics

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.

  Immanuel Kant

  Art, Play, Imagination

  Immanuel Kant (2013). “Kant's Critiques”, p.691, Simon and Schuster

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• Shakespeare's fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste.

  Denis Diderot

  Fall, May, Taste

  Denis Diderot (1966). “Selected Writings”, New York : Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anesthetic: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression--a kind of rudimentary theater--as do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means.

  John Barth

  Art, Mean, Men

  John Barth (1984). “The Friday book: essays and other nonfiction”, Putnam Pub Group

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is an evil world. The fires of hatred and violence burn fiercely. Evil is powerful, the devil covers a darkened earth with hisblack wings. And soon the end of the world is expected. But mankind does not repent, the church struggles, and the preachers and poets warn and lament in vain.

  Johan Huizinga

  Powerful, Struggle, Fire

  11 Copy quote

• the rest of my days I spend
  wandering: wondering
  what, anyway,
  was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that
  poetry, by which I lived?

  Galway Kinnell

  Blood, Poetry, Flavor

  Galway Kinnell (2001). “A New Selected Poems”, p.73, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Goodbye,
  you who are, for me, the postmarks again
  of shattered towns--Xenia, Burnt Cabins,
  Hornell--
  their loneliness
  given away in poems, only their solitude kept.

  Galway Kinnell

  Goodbye, War, Loneliness

  Galway Kinnell, “The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye To His Poetry Students”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source