Poet Quotes - Page 28

• Look at this poet William Carlos Williams: he is primitive and native, and his roots are in raw forest and violent places; he is word-sick and place-crazy. He admires strength, but for what? Violence! This is the cult of the frontier mind.

  Edward Dahlberg

  Strength, Crazy, Roots

  Edward Dahlberg (1967). “Alms for Oblivion”, U of Minnesota Press

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• Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.

  Howard Nemerov

  Science, Silence, Shining

  Howard Nemerov (1978). “Figures of thought: speculations on the meaning of poetry & other essays”

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• How many modern transsexuals are unacknowledged shamans? Perhaps it is to poets they should go for counsel, rather than surgeons.

  Camille Paglia

  Modern, Should, Transsexuals

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae”, p.65, Yale University Press

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• Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has - the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge - infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Knowledge, Mean, Civilization

  "The Life of Poetry". Book by Muriel Rukeyser. Chapter One: "The Fear of Poetry", 1949.

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• The great charm of poetry consists in lively pictures of the sublime passions, magnanimity, courage, disdain of fortune; or thoseof the tender affections, love and friendship; which warm the heart, and diffuse over it similar sentiments and emotions.

  David Hume

  Heart, Passion, Poetry

  David Hume (1758). “Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects”, p.453

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• There is only one vice, which may be found in life with as strong features, and as high a colouring as needs be employed by any satyrist or comic poet; and that is AVARICE.

  David Hume

  Strong, Color, Vices

  David Hume (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of David Hume (Illustrated)”, p.923, Delphi Classics

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• The spiritual kinship between Lincoln and Whitman was founded upon their Americanism, their essential Westernism. Whitman had grown up without much formal education; Lincoln had scarcely any education. One had become the notable poet of the day; one the orator of the Gettsyburg Address. It was inevitable that Whitman as a poet should turn with a feeling of kinship to Lincoln, and even without any association or contact feel that Lincoln was his.

  Edgar Lee Masters

  Spiritual, Feelings, Essentials

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• I invented the colors of the vowels!--A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green--I made rules for the form and movement of each consonant, and, and with instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself that I had created a poetic language accessible, some day, to all the senses.

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Blue, Color, White

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• My verse
  has brought me
  no roubles to spare:
  no craftsmen have made
  mahogany chairs for my house.

  Vladimir Mayakovsky

  Poetry, House, Craftsman

  Vladimir Mayakovsky, “At The Top Of My Voice”

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• It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life.... [ellipsis in source] Illness, old age, and death--subjects as ancient as humanity--these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak.

  Louise Bogan

  Life, Writing, Poetry

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• Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side,
  And madness chooses out my voice again,
  Again.

  Louise Bogan

  Song, Wings, Voice

  Louise Bogan (1941). “Poems and new poems”

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• Poetic experience is distinct in nature from mystical experience. Because poetry emanates from the free creativity of the spirit,it is from the very start oriented toward expression, and terminates in a word proffered, it wants to speak; whereas mystical because it emanates from the deepest longing of the spirit bent on knowing, tends of itself toward silence and internal fruition. Poetic experience is busy with the created world and the enigmatic and innumerable relations of existents with one another, not with the Principle of Being.

  Jacques Maritain

  Creativity, Expression, Mystical Experiences

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• Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
  And ever after called him a curse,
  Then why did he hurry to let him in?
  He could have hid in the house.

  Stevie Smith

  Poetry, House, Ever After

  Stevie Smith (1988). “New Selected Poems of Stevie Smith”, p.87, New Directions Publishing

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• Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean.

  Northrop Frye

  Children, Mean, Thinking

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• Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems.

  Maxine Kumin

  Women, Poetry, Uterus

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• If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.

  Countee Cullen

  Ifs

  Countee Cullen (2013). “Countee Cullen: Collected Poems: (American Poets Project #32)”, p.31, Library of America

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• And me happiest when I compose poems:
  Love, power, the huzza of battle
  are something, are much:
  yet a poem includes them like a pool
  water and reflection.

  Irving Layton

  Reflection, Water, Poetry

  Irving Layton (2012). “A Wild Peculiar Joy: The Selected Poems”, p.23, McClelland & Stewart

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• I testify
  to rainbow feathers, to the span of heaven
  and walls of colour,
  the colonnades of jasper.

  Hilda Doolittle

  Wall, Rainbow, Poetry

  Hilda Doolittle (1998). “Trilogy”, New Directions Publishing

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• Take what the old-church
  found in Mithra's tomb,
  candle and script and bell,
  take what the new-church spat upon
  and broke and shattered.

  Hilda Doolittle

  Poetry, Church, Iconoclasm

  Hilda Doolittle (1998). “Trilogy”, New Directions Publishing

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• I want a bedroom near the sky, an astrologer's cave
  Where I can fashion eclogues that are chaste and grave.

  John Ashbery

  Fashion, Sky, Astrology

  John Ashbery (1985). “A Wave: Poems”, p.7, Ardent Media

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• Some certified nut
  Will try to tell you it's poetry,
  (It's extraordinary, it makes a great deal of sense)
  But watch out or he'll start with some
  New notion or other.

  John Ashbery

  Nuts, Poetry, Trying

  John Ashbery (1986). “Selected Poems”

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• And we may be led, then, upward through more
  Powerful forms of poetry, past columns
  With peeling posters on them, to the country of indifference.
  Meanwhile if the swell diapasons, blooms
  Unhappily and too soon, the little people are nonetheless real.

  John Ashbery

  Country, Art, Powerful

  John Ashbery (1986). “Selected Poems”

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• Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,
  Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
  And spaced by many years, each line an act
  Through which few labor, which no men retract.
  This passion is the scholar's heritage

  Yvor Winters

  Passion, Men, Years

  Yvor Winters (1963). “Collected Poems”

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• The difference between poetry and rhetoric
  is being
  ready to kill
  yourself
  instead of your children.

  Audre Lorde

  Children, Differences, Poetry

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.106, Crossing Press

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• What raises great poetry above all else--it is the entire person and also the entire world.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Character, Poetry, World

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