Quotes About Poets

Poets may know hunger,' she commented drily, 'but historians devour. And devouring murders language, makes of it a dead thing.

When politicians give up on liberty, it falls to poets to preserve it. Or to write its epitaph.

Poetry is one of my guilty pleasures and I want to thank you poets for providing me with beautiful words that I can devour and selfishly indulge in any time I want. ?-Nina Jean Slack

Vidal had his exuberant and stately tower in the most elegant and elevated part of Pedralbes, surrounded by hills, trees, and fairy-tale skies. I would have my sinister tower rising above the oldest, darkest streets of the city, surrounded by the miasmas and the shadows of that necropolis which poets and murderers had once called the Rose of Fire.

Well, what the heck, poets are supposed to be odd, aren't they?

People say I must be cold–natured—sexless—on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self–contained in their daily lives.

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.

It always happens that, directly it has been found wanting and discarded by the poets and philosophers, there comes along a King to whom it is a perfectly new idea, and who makes it a guiding principle. That is what kings are like. It is not only that kings are men – they are even very distinctly average men; they are always a good way in the rear.

MANY poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves.

The old poets knew all along: the wilderness has an awful tongue, which teaches doubt.

The truth is that poets are human beings, and what a poet has to say about his work is often far from being the most illuminating word on the subject. What is required of us, then, is nothing less than to defend the importance of the visionary experience against the poet himself.

Hofmannsthal once observed that the activity of modern poets "stands under the decree of necessity, as though they were all building on a pyramid, the monstrous residence of a dead king or an unborn god.

For a number of Russian writers and poets, St. Petersburg is a mythical city; to Irène Némirovsky it was nothing more than a collection of dark, snow-covered streets, swept by the icy wind that rose from the disgusting, polluted canals of the Neva.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.

Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?

For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.

People in Ireland take in the whole song. After a long history of great singers and songwriters and poets, they are able to consume the entire song - not just the external; they go inside.

As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.

Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost. Patrocles does not strike us as a hero because of his accomplishments (he was rapidly killed) but because he preferred to die than see Achilles sulking into inaction. Clearly, the epic poets understood invisible histories. Also later thinkers and poets had more elaborate methods for dealing with randomness, as we will see with stoicism.

Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer. So I will expose the transfer of fragility, or rather the theft of antifragility, by people "arbitraging" the system. These people will be named by name. Poets and painters are free, liberi poetae et pictores, and there are severe moral imperatives that come with such freedom. First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.