Quotes About Poets

We are always parting! It's supposed to be sweet sorrow or something, isn't it? Those poets. They'll say anything.

It has a constant tendency to the aphorism—the ripe fruit hanging on the tree of knowledge—noticeable in the writings of the higher order of men of genius; the great dramatists, the poets generally, Bacon, Burke, Franklin, Landor, and indeed most of the classic authors who pass current in the world in quotation.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work. Consider the discrepancies between the actual writing of the Greek poets and dramatists, and the theories of the Graeco-Roman grammarians, concocted to explain their metres.

For hundreds of years, their recorded writings—whether nuns or poets, inspired teachers or artists—have described a division, or painful restlessness, within themselves prior to a moment of illumination when a great light or descent of grace fell upon them.

Marxism, famously a cry of pain rather than a science, has had its poets, but so has every other major religious heresy.

Poets and critics alike seek to convert opinion into knowledge, but this means opinion in the legal and not the public sense. What is it you know when you recognize a voice?

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

Complex astronomical instruments like the Antikythera Mechanism and the Nebra Sky Disk were made by Pagans. Our Pagan intellectual heritage includes poets and scientists and literary intellectuals of every kind, especially including those who wrote some of the most important and influential books in all of Western history.

I was well acquainted with the Calcutta literary circle since I was 17, when I lived in Bangladesh and published and edited a little magazine called 'Sejuti,' for which young poets from both Bengals wrote. If you look at my life, there is no question of using anyone for anything. I have only got banned, blacklisted and banished.

I really have a distaste for poets who announce themselves at 50 yards; you know, here he comes, you know, with the beret and the cane and the cape and the whatever - whatever mishegas is part of the outfit there.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.

I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.

The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.

It is so easy to be wild and let love rip; poets get such easy kudos.

In some strata of Greek and Roman society the engineer was actually denigrated, higher esteem being accorded to poets, playwrights and sculptors. According to Plutarch, Archimedes was praised for refusing to contaminate his theoretical and mathematical science with practical applications, although under extreme pressure at the siege of Syracuse in Sicily he did design practical machinery.

Blessings be with them, and eternal praise, Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares!- The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays.

I think poets tell better history than historians. Historians lie all the time but the poets can get to truth of it.

In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.

There were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworkers and the Bessemer convertor of love.

And there were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworks and the Bessemer converter of love.

These poets (fans of whatever) should be contacting other young poets on their way - not those who have made it, who sit on a star and then have plenty of problems: usually no money, usually the fear their own writing is going down the sink hole.

I did sketch comedy with a troupe at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

Most poets are elitist dregs more concerned with proving their skill with a dictionary than communicating ideas with impact.