Quotes About Poet

I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet's life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.

To practice your scales, so to speak, in order play the symphony, is what you have to do as a young poet.

There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.

A poet without memory, said Marconi, is like a criminal and nearly undone by feelings of decency. A poet without memory is an oxymoron. Because the poet is the memory of the language.

A storyteller, a displaced poet, will absorb reading differently.

Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his co-ordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.

But it's your Oracle, I protested. Can't you tell us what the prophecy means? Apollo sighed. You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear through the search.

He] had the soul of a poet, and because of this, he liked very much to consider questions that had no answers.

Leo Matienne had the soul of a poet, and because of this, he liked very much to consider questions that had no answers.

When I have all of Manhattan to choose from I tend to dither, to hold out for perfection—but as any poet can testify, limits encourage both inspiration and decisiveness.

but as any poet can testify, limits encourage both inspiration and decisiveness.

The poet found illness a convenient language for his skewed relation to normal life, for his inability at times to function, for his radical abdication of responsibilities. Illness offered, for decades, a comfortable way for him to think about himself. Ever the poet, he pretty much set up camp and lived in the metaphor of being sick.

States of soul rightly expressed, as the poet expresses them in moments of pure inspiration, retain forever the power of creating like states. It is this that makes genuine literature a vital force.

Every original poet has a new insight, or rather introduces a new power.

The light that never was, on sea or land,The consecration, and the poet's dream.

A poet could not but be gay,In such a jocund company.

If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarised to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the house of man.

A poet does not see or hear or feel things that others do not see or hear or feel. What makes a person a poet is the ability to recall what she has felt and seen and heard. And to relive it and describe it in such a way that others can then see and feel and hear again what they may have missed.

MILTON! thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

Is T.S. Eliot the only poet one can think of who could have spent a year on his own in Paris at twenty-three—and managed to have no sexual encounter whatsoever?

Northrop Frye said that a poet is a myth's way of making another myth.

As a poet, he is both the firm teacher trying to guide us and the mild one inviting us to develop on our own, a paradox captured in lines like "I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?" or "He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

It's true I'm not very well off But I feel richer than Boris Karloff Because I'm a poet, because I know you And because I know how much I need Which isn't much but it's easy to bluff That you have enough when you have the freedom To know pretty well when enough is enough. —