Quotes About Poet

Honor is the greatest poet.

A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.

Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children's future.

I hope I'm not implying role of contemporary poet for myself, although there's a kind of resonant paradigm. It's traditionally a difficult role.

I'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.

What an ornament and safeguard is humor! Far better than wit for a poet and writer. It is a genius itself, and so defends from the insanities.

The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.

What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.

One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination. The Divine Vision.

The solitude of the poet is the uniqueness of his experience, and the particulaity of his sensitivity and imagination.

The greatest poet who ever wrote about rowing is Virgil, the greatest historian is Thucydides, but the greatest imagination ever to turn its attention to the sport is that of painter, Thomas Eakins.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

The poet who walks by moonlight is conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence.

If thou indeed derive thy light from Heaven, Then, to the measure of that heaven-born light, Shine, Poet! In thy place, and be content. . . —WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

[A]utumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season which has drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling. She occupied her mind as much as possible in such like musings and quotations...

The epic poet is all taken up with what he called klea andron, "glorious deeds of men," of individual heroes; and what these heroes themselves ardently long and pray for is just this glory, this personal distinction, this deathless fame for their great deeds.

The Mountain One moment, the mountain is clear in strong morning sunlight. The next, vanished in fog. I returned to Tu Fu, afraid to look up again from my reading and find in the window moonlight - but when I do, the fog is still there, and only the ancient poet's hair has turned gray while a single wild goose passed him, silently climbing.

Such was a poet and shall be and is -who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand.

All writers are unaffiliated. The novelist, the poet, will understand the institutions they live within, including their religious traditions, as aggregate historically amended fictions. Appointing themselves as witnesses, they are necessarily independent of all institutions, including the institution of the family-which may be why nothing makes family members more nervous than the discovery that one of them is a writer.

Because of his unusual way of handling language, Cummings had to travel a long road from the time his early books were ridiculed for their eccentricity to the point at which, with Robert Frost, he was one of the two most popular poets in America.

Fairest of the deathless gods. This idea the Greeks had of him is best summed up not by a poet, but by a philosopher, Plato: Love—Eros—makes his home in men's hearts, but not in every heart, for where there is hardness he departs. His greatest glory is that he cannot do wrong nor allow it; force never comes near him. For all men serve of him their own free will. And he whom Love touches not walks in darkness.

In the Odyssey when a priest and a poet fall on their knees before Odysseus, praying him to spare their lives, the hero kills the priest without a thought, but saves the poet. Homer says that he felt awe to slay a man who had been taught his divine art by the gods. Not the priest, but the poet, had influence with heaven—and no one was ever afraid of a poet.

A poet can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory.

A poet," he liked to say, "can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory.