Quotes About Poet

This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher the poet's equal there.

Inainte de razboi, traia acel poet batran si bolnav, uitat de toata lumea, si care, citisem undeva, le poruncise alor sai sa spuna ca nu e acasa pentru nici un vizitator. Nevast?-sa, din mil?, mergea din când în când s? sune la u??...

Nothing more abominable than the critic and, a fortiori, the philosopher in each of us: if I were a poet, I should behave like Dylan Thomas, who, when people would discuss his poems in his presence, would drop to the floor in a fit of convulsions.

A poor wretch who feels time, who is its victim, its martyr, who experiences nothing else, who is time at each moment, knows what a metaphysician or a poet divines only by grace of a collapse or a miracle.

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

However strong in any poet may be the higher qualities of abstract thought or conceiving fancy, unless he can actually sympathise with those around him, he can never describe those around him. Any attempt to produce a likeness of what is not really liked by the person who is describing it, will end in the creation of what may be correct, but is not living—of what may be artistic, but is likewise artificial.

But then the mist of battles passes away, and the sound of the daily conflict no longer hurtles in the air, and a generation arises skilled with the skill of peace, and refined with the refinement of civilization, yet still remembering the old world, still appreciating the old life, still wondering at the old men, and ready to receive, at the hand of the poet, a new telling of the old tale.

No two characters could, indeed, be found more opposite than the open, eager, buoyant poet, and the dark, threatening, unbelieving critic.

What does it mean to be a great poet? It means that you wrote one or two great poems. Or great parts of poems. That's all it means. Don't try to picture the waste or it will alarm you.

I don't think any novelist is happy being just a novelist. I'm sure you know this. We should be poets. We should be composers and we should be making language do things that the novel won't allow you to do. This is what I've been trying to do for a long time.

Patanjali's method for achieving insight is far from the mystical ecstasy of a poet like St. John of the Cross or the ritual ecstasy of a shaman in a trance. It is instead a contemplative intensity that unbinds the constraints of everyday experience.

The lamp you lighted in the olden time Will show you my heart's-blood beating through the rhyme: A poet's journal, writ in fire and tears... Then slow deliverance, with the gaps of years...

The willed recovery of what's been lost - often forcibly, I suppose - is what keeps me going. It is this reason I found myself a poet and a collector and now a curator: to save what we didn't even know needed saving.

The poet complains or points out the discontent that lies at the heart of man, the individual man, and how can that be redeemed?

I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.

He was in fact a poet without words, the more absorbed and endangered, that the springing waters were dammed back in his soul, where, finding no utterance, they grew, and swelled, and undermined.

That's a poet.' 'I thought you said it was a bo-at.' 'Stupid pet! Don't you know what a poet it?' 'Why, a thing to sail on the water in.' 'Well, perhaps you're not so far wrong. Some poets do carry people over the sea....' ... 'A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it too.

There is hardly a limit to the knowledge and sympathy a man may have in respect of the finest things, and yet be a fool. Sympathy is not harmony. A man may be a poet even, and speak with the tongue of an angel, and yet be a very bad fool.

Thy very ATTENTION, does it not mean an attentio, a STRETCHING-TO? Fancy that act of the mind, which all were conscious of, which none had yet named,—when this new poet first felt bound and driven to name it.

Alas, it is too true. I visited him this morning and found him en deshabille, clasping his brown. He seized on me and demanded a rhyme to some word which I have forgot. So I left him. Can no one convince Philippe that he is not a poet? asked De Bergeret plaintively. De Vangrisse shook his head.

To listen to a poet arguing with himself – for she could scarcely have been said to have borne any part in the discussion – on the merits of blank verse as a dramatic medium was naturally a privilege of which any young lady must be proud, but there could be no denying that to talk for half an hour to a man who listened with interest to anything she said was, if not precisely a relief, certainly a welcome variation in her life.

I am a poet; I am not a worker. I need to be free.

I've worked throughout California as a poet: in colleges, universities, worker camps, migrant education offices, continuation high schools, juvenile halls, prisons, and gifted classrooms.