Quotes About Poets

I still believe many poets begin in fear and hope: fear that the poetic past will turn out to be a monologue rather than a conversation. And hope that their voice can be heard as that past turns into a future.

New voices in an old art - and women poets have been that for much more than a century - do not diminish the art through the category. They enrich it. They renew it with common quandaries of craft and innovation. The category simply allows the quandaries to be seen more clearly.

Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience.

Our own poor poets, I am afraid, have been so intimidated by our clinics and laboratories that they have abandoned the first principles of beginning, that of the festival; and the heart of the festival has always been the atmosphere of myth, of delight.

The American identity has never been a singular one and the voices of poets invariably sing, in addition to their own, the voices of those around them.

In the light of our Mexican discoveries, I was now asking myself whether Soma could have been a mushroom. I said to myself that inevitably the poets would introduce into their hymns innumerable hints for the identification of the celebrated Soma, not of course to help us, millennia later and thousands of miles away, but as their poetic inspiration freely dictated.

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

Maledizione antica dei poeti che invece di parlare si lamentano, che sempre giudicano il loro sentimento invece di formarlo; e si ostinano a pensare che quanto in loro è lieto o triste, spetti a loro deplorare o celebrare nella poesia.

She did come from a family of bards, Jake," Atticus said. "Beards?" Dan asked. "Bards," Atticus said with a snort of laughter. "Poets. The learned scholars of Ireland." "I bet they had beards, though," Dan said, and Atticus laughed and threw an eraser at him.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.

Such brutality is required because dissenters, subversives, artists, poets, and prophets invite thought that the regime is not absolute, that its claims to legitimacy are not ultimate, that its policies are not beyond criticism nor its practices beyond destabilization.

The world-view of the poets centred in their experience of human destiny itself and of the way in which it could be overcome through that spirit of heroism in the midst of tragedy which had grown to maturity in the hard struggles of a century filled with inward upheaval and threatened with constant danger from without.

e, al contrario dei gatti, in natura i poeti non esistono.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

Powerful societies do not silence their poietai in order that they may go to war; they go to war as a way of silencing their poietai. Original thinkers can be suppressed through execution and exile, or they can be encouraged through subsidy and flattery to praise the society's heroes. Alexander and Napoleon took their poets and their scholars into battle with them, saving themselves the nuisance of repression and along the way drawing ever larger audiences to their triumph.

Poets cannot kill; they die. Metaphysics cannot die; it kills.

Infinite players are not serious actors in any story, but the joyful poets of a story that continues to originate what they cannot finish.

glasgow's full of poets give it laldy pure bobo balde

When I was little, my dad told me about Anandpur Sahib and the court of Guru Gobind Singh. That we came from a tradition of poets, warriors and artists who created when it was illegal to create... we're groomed to be reckless in the defense of what we feel is right.

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know.

There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.

It is always difficult for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend, but because their poems are bad.

I say, doctors are the profiteers of death and unclaimed cadavers that were once inhabited by homeless and wondering poets!