Quotes About Poets

Great poets are great copy editors.

Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea They thought great thoughts about liberty Poets wrote down words that did fit Writers wrote books Thinkers thought about it.

All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.

The old poets little knew what comfort they could be to a man.

Melancholy men of all others are most witty, which causeth many times a divine ravishment, and a kinde of Enthusiasmus, which stirreth them up to bee excellent Philosophers, Poets, Prophets, etc.

The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods.

There are two classes of men called poets. The one cultivates life, the other art,... one satisfies hunger, the other gratifies the palate.

Star Trek fans usually know the metaphors of life better than most mainstream poets.

Maybe because heroes to her weren't the guys who flexed their muscles and went to battle. No, for her, the real heroes were the artists, the poets, the men who were brave enough to voice their emotions. It took courage to be honest. It took courage to face your demons head on with words, to go beyond the hunter-gatherer thing. The world needed the action hero, but it also needed the quiet hero, the poet. Rick

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.

Rarely do things perish from my memory that are worth remembering. Rubbish dies instantly. Hence it happens that passages in Latin or English poets, which I never could have read but once (and that thirty years ago), often begin to blossom anew when I am lying awake, unable to sleep.

This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything--as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.

It was love, she thought, love that never clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of human gain. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem.

To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it - the poets and the novelists - can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma - a mirage.

Here are the dead poets, still musing, still pondering, still questioning the meaning of existence.

The age was the Elizabethan; their morals were not ours; nor their poets; nor their climate; nor their vegetables even. Everything was different. The weather itself, the heat and cold of summer and winter, was, we may believe, of another temper altogether.

Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.

Here, I'll tell you—with my love I could have filled ten centuries of fire, songs, and valour—ten whole centuries, enormous and winged,—full of knights riding up blazing hills—and legends about giants—and fierce Troys—and orange sails—and pirates—and poets.

Now I shall speak of evil as none has Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz; The white-hosed moron torturing a black Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac; Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools; Music in supermarkets; swimming pools; Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx, 930  Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.

All great poets become naturally, fatally, critics.

As Nietzsche says about Christians, you can tell from their faces that they don't enjoy doing what they do. Fiction writers cluster in the unlit corners of the room, silently observing everybody, including the poets, who are usually having a fine time in the center spotlight, making a spectacle of themselves as they eat the popcorn and drink the beer and gossip about other poets.

and the owl made a noise with very little resemblance in it to the noise conventionally assigned to the owl by men-poets. But it is the obstinate custom of such creatures hardly ever to say what is set down for them.

Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.

Love is like an April day, Half of sunshine, half of shower; Right the poets, they who say Love is like an April day— Silver lined, deny who may, Are the clouds that darkly lower— Love is like an April day, Half of sunshine, half of shower.