Poet Quotes - Page 31

• Korea's first Zen Master-poet wrote simple yet elegant poetry of the world he inhabited, both physically and spiritually, and of daily insights-a pause along the way for a deep clear breath, a moon-viewing moment, a seasonal note or a farewell poem to a departing monk. His poems speak softly and clearly, like hearing a temple bell that was struck a thousand years ago.

  Sam Hamill

  Farewell, Moon, Simple

  4 Copy quote

• There is nothing “still” in the remarkably visceral poems of Alexander Long's third collection, Still Life, and nothing is at rest in these restless and edgy poems. Conversational and kinetic, these poems chart the traces left by the shifting overlays of the templates of literature, rock-and-roll, and contemporary culture. As each poem in Still Life attempts to fix a focus upon a scene or subject, the protean natures under view draw the poet into the eddies and complexities of reflection. This is a powerful and moving collection of poems.

  David St. John

  Powerful, Moving, Reflection

  4 Copy quote

• One of Still Lifes many achievements is its paradoxical mix of intensity and stillness. Alexander Longs visions of landscape, identity and "History itself, a joke that no one gets" are simultaneously meditative and alert, restless and focused. This is a smart, compassionate poet. Still Life is a mesmerizing new book.

  Terrance Hayes

  Smart, Book, Achievement

  4 Copy quote

• Poets have the gift to speak for others, Vasko Popa had the very rare quality of hearing the others.

  Octavio Paz

  Quality, Hearing, Speak

  4 Copy quote

• These are crystalline - oftentimes incandescent - translations of Juarroz's powerful metaphysical poems where eternity and silence jut up against a world where “writing infects the landscape” and there are “more letters than leaves” - The kind of match one hopes for where both the translator and the poet are in luck; new poems which don't leak and yet old poems in which the original passion shines.

  Jorie Graham

  Powerful, Passion, Writing

  6 Copy quote

• Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation.

  Robert Hass

  Twenties, Vivid, Firsts

  4 Copy quote

• All of a sudden I understand why I like Aliki Barnstones poems so much. They remind me of the one she has studied most - shall we call her her master - Emily Dickinson. Not in the forms, not, as such, in the music, and not in the references; but in that weird intimacy, that eerie closeness, that absolute confession of soul.... In Barnstone, too, the two worlds are intensely present, and the voice moves back and forth between them. She has the rare art of distance and closeness. It gives her her fine music, her wisdom, her form. She is a fine poet.

  Gerald Stern

  Art, Distance, Moving

  5 Copy quote

• Hyesims poems: transformative as walking high granite mountains by moonlight, with fragrant herbs underfoot and a thermos of clear tea in the backpack. Their bedrock is thusness, their images beauty is pellucid and new, their view without limit. The shelf of essential Zen poets for American readers grows larger with this immediately indispensable collection.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Views, Tea, Mountain

  4 Copy quote

• To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

  Wallace Stevens

  Literature, Painting, Problem

  "Opus Posthumou". Book by Wallace Stevens, 1955.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A great poet does not express his or her self; he expresses all of our selves.

  Gary Snyder

  Self, Doe, Great Poet

  Gary Snyder, William Scott McLean (1980). “The Real Work: Interviews & Talks, 1964-1979”, p.65, New Directions Publishing

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ah, there are so many things betwixt heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Heaven, Earth, Heaven And Earth

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2016). “Thus spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None”, p.150, Friedrich Nietzsche

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!

  Henry David Thoreau

  Eye, Men, Mind

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Selected Essays of Henry David Thoreau”, p.203, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Artist, Imagination, Track

  Henry David Thoreau (1882). “Walden”, p.153

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included,--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wildness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wild man in her, became extinct.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Animal, Men, Lakes

  Henry David Thoreau (2017). “Civil Disobedience & Other Essays - Premium Collection: 26 Political, Philosophical & Historical Essays: Slavery in Massachusetts, Life Without Principle, The Landlord, Walking, Sir Walter Raleigh, Paradise (to be) Regained, Herald of Freedom, A Plea for Captain John Brown, The Highland Light, Dark Ages…”, p.167, e-artnow

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The murmurs of many a famous river on the other side of the globe reach even to us here, as to more distant dwellers on its banks;many a poet's stream, floating the helms and shields of heroes on its bosom.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Inspirational, Hero, Rivers

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.17, Courier Corporation

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Inspirational, Civilization, Moss

  Henry David Thoreau (1873). “The Maine Woods”, p.160

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• But there are spirits of a yet more liberal culture, to whom no simplicity is barren. There are not only stately pines, but fragile flowers, like the orchises, commonly described as too delicate for cultivation, which derive their nutriment from the crudest mass of peat. These remind us, that, not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger's path and the Indian's trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Inspirational, Flower, Simplicity

  Henry David Thoreau (1873). “The Maine Woods”, p.160

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Done, Littles

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.64, Xist Publishing

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Father, Rome

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Selected Essays of Henry David Thoreau”, p.170, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Odds, Criticism, Genius

  4 Copy quote

• Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find political reasons for the commercial schemes that they have done for some time past they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers... I do resent the whole age of patronage being revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets becoming court poets, under kings that have taken no oath.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Kings, Taken, Past

  "Utopia of Usurers". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, pp. 15-17, 1917.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Imagination, which is the Eldorado of the poet and of the novel-writer, often proves the most pernicious gift to the individuals who compose the talkers instead of the writers in society.

  Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington

  Imagination, Storytelling, Individual

  5 Copy quote

• Each state of the human mind has some parable in the physical creation by which it is shadowed forth; nor is it only artists and poets, but even the most abstract thinkers that have drawn from this source. Lively activity we name fire; time is a stream that rolls on, sweeping all before it; eternity is a circle; a mystery is hid in midnight gloom, and truth dwells in the sun. Nay, I begin to believe that even the future destiny of the human race is prefigured in the dark oracular utterances of bodily creation.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Believe, Dark, Destiny

  Friedrich Schiller (1884). “Works”

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child. He must take to pieces the whole web of his mind. He must unlearn much of that knowledge which has perhaps constituted hitherto his chief title to superiority. His very talents will be a hindrance to him.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Children, Poetry, Mind

  4 Copy quote

• In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Criticism, May, Critics

  "Criticisms on the Principal Italian Writers, Dante", 1824.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source