Poet Quotes - Page 5

• The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

  T. S. Eliot

  Writing, Poetry, Feelings

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Selected Essays”, p.17, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.

  Jean Cocteau

  Art, Philosophy, History

  Jean Cocteau (1990). “Opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure”, Peter Owen Publishers

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• You ask me where I get my ideas. That I cannot tell you with certainty. They come unsummoned, directly, indirectly - I could seize them with my hands - out in the open air, in the woods, while walking, in the silence of the nights, at dawn, excited by moods which are translated by the poet into words, by me into tones that sound and roar and storm about me till I have set them down in notes.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Night, Air, Hands

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• Why do people speak of great men in terms of nationality? Great Germans, great Englishmen? Goethe always protested against being called a German poet. Great men are simply men and are not to be considered from the point of view of nationality, nor should the environment in which they were brought up be taken into account.

  Albert Einstein

  Taken, Men, Views

  Quoted in N.Y. Times, 18 Apr. 1926

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• It is unwise to equate scientific activity with what we call reason, poetic activity with what we call imagination. Without the imaginative leap from facts to generalisation, no theoretic discovery in science is made. The poet, on the other hand, must not imagine but reason--that is to say, he must exercise a great deal of consciously directed thought in the selection and rejection of his data: there is a technical logic, a poetic reasoning in his choice of the words, rhythms and images by which a poem's coherence is achieved.

  Cecil Day-Lewis

  Exercise, Science, Discovery

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• I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman.

  Robert Graves

  Believe, Passion, Poetry

  Lecture at Oxford. Time, December 15, 1961.

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• Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Writing, Reading Poetry

  The Sacred Wood "Philip Massinger" (1920)

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• Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

  Plato

  Life, Wise, Wisdom

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• - How is he in bed? Gladiator or poet? - Hmmm... A poetic gladiator.

  Nora Roberts

  Bed, Poetic, Hmmm

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• Criticism is infested with the cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit to imitate the sayers.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Expression, Skills

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1979). “Emerson's Literary Criticism”, p.27, U of Nebraska Press

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• "Work" does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Men, Doe, Hunters

  Marshall McLuhan (1964). “Understanding media: the extensions of man”

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• What poetry does above all else is develop sensibility. And that's what makes poetry so dangerous. That's why poetry is so good at undermining governments and so bad at building them. There's nothing harder to organize than a group of poets.

  Sam Hamill

  Government, Groups, Doe

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

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• A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end.
  Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

  Robert Graves

  Perfect, Poetry, Immature

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• Poetry: the best words in the best order.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Writing, Vocabulary, Prose Poetry

  Table Talk 12 July 1827 (1835)

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• Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

  Paul Engle

  Ideas, Reading Poetry, Skins

  New York Times, February 17, 1957.

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• Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

  Leonard Cohen

  Writing, Poetry, Ashes

  "My favourite word in songwriting history is 'that'" by Laura Barton, www.theguardian.com. May 31, 2007.

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• I say, 'Get me some poets as managers.' Poets are our original systems thinkers. They contemplate the world in which we live and feel obligated to interpret, and give expression to it in a way that makes the reader understand how that world runs. Poets, those unheralded systems thinkers, are our true digital thinkers. It is from their midst that I believe we will draw tomorrow's new business leaders." --Sidney Harman, CEO Multimillionaire of a stereo components company

  Daniel H. Pink

  Running, Believe, Expression

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• Truth like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold screenwriter of Dead Poets' Society.

  Tom Schulman

  Truth, Dead Poets Society, Feet

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• The eyes of a poet discover in each person a unique and irreplaceable humanity. While arrogant intellect seeks to control and manipulate the world, the poetic spirit bows with reverence before its mysteries.

  Daisaku Ikeda

  Eye, Unique, Humanity

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• A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

  Jean Cocteau

  Nurse, Rose, Poetry

  Jean Cocteau (1926*). “A Call to Order, Written Between the Years 1918 and 1926 and Including "Cock and Harlequin", "Professional Secrets", and Other Critical Essays”

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• I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Clever, Prose And Poetry, Prose Poetry

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Nelson Coleridge (1835). “Specimens of the table talk of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge”, p.84

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• As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

  T. S. Eliot

  Games, Careers, May

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• The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within...could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Inspiration, Greatness, Wind

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• Formerly I believed books were made like this: a poet came, lightly opened his lips, and the inspired fool burst into song – if you please! But it seems, before they can launch a song, poets must tramp for days with callused feet, and the sluggish fish of the imagination flounders softly in the slush of the heart. And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth of loves and nightingales, the tongueless street merely writhes for lack of something to shout or say

  Vladimir Mayakovsky

  Song, Book, Heart

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, “A Cloud In Trousers - Part II”

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• Call it not vain: they do not err Who say that when the poet dies Mute Nature mourns her worshipper, And celebrates his obsequies.

  Walter Scott

  Nature, Celebrate, Vain

  Walter Scott, Sir Walter Scott (1841). “The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart”, p.30

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