Quotes About Poet

Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief.

The poet gives his whole life such a voluntarily steep incline that it is impossible for it to exist in the vertical line of biography where we expect to meet it. It is not to be found under his own name and must be sought under those of others, in the biographical columns of his followers. The more self-contained the individuality from which the life derives, the more collective, without any figurative speaking, is its story.

Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.

The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

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.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.

will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

The aim of the poet is to state a vision, and no vision of life can be complete which does not include the articulate formulation of life which human minds make.

And the poet who fears to take the risk that what he writes may turn out not to be poetry at all, is a man who has surely failed, who ought to have adopted a less adventurous vocation

Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem's power is as an instrument of possession but at the same time, ineffably, it expresses the desire for possession, like a net that fishes by itself, a hook that is also the desire of the fish. To be a poet is to desire and, at the same time, to obtain, in the exact shape of the desire.

I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred million men march in step in a parody of order.

Tenés miedo; querés estar seguro. No sé de qué... Sos como un médico, no como un poeta.

Man has reached the moon, but twenty centuries ago a poet knew the enchantments that would make the moon come down to earth.

El poeta ¡Oh rosa, me hablan de la guerra! ¿Cómo podré decirles que eres aquí en mi ser exactamente la sola y esencial respuesta? Yo no estoy lejos de la calle porque abra arriba mi balcón, ni lejos del cantar mi voz porque en el coro usual no cante. Oh rosa, me hablan de los hombres como de un triste y cruel trabajo. Sólo tú sabes que te canto para llevarte hasta sus voces.

A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland.

I think Shehnaz was right. In the end it wasn't about the Poet, or me or anyone. It was about a minute, five minutes, ten minutes in which she believed, with utter certainty, that she simply could not endure any more.' It seemed impossible, already, to have denied this truth for so long.

I'm told that when Auden died, they found his Oxford all but clawed to pieces. That is the way a poet and his dictionary should come out.

Poor Cecil, consumed by a grande passion, only to be told to compress his love manifesto into a haiku. "I won't try to excuse my behavior," he said. "It was despicable." Or a limerick. There once was a rotter named Cecil, Whose Love Interest wished he could be still. Oh well. Unlike some, at least, I've never pretended to be a poet.

The great poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: "Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart, and learn to love the questions themselves.

A strong, brave man is born each month, each year God gives a sage to men, A poet each ten years, perhaps, but an unselfish person,—when?