Quotes About Poets

We are the only poets," Emily told Susan, "and everyone else is prose.

The Martyr Poets The Martyr Poets — did not tell — But wrought their Pang in syllable — That when their mortal name be numb — Their mortal fate — encourage Some — The Martyr Painters — never spoke — Bequeathing — rather — to their Work That when their conscious fingers cease — Some seek in Art — the Art of Peace —

Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.

So perhaps the philosophers and politicians and poets are wrong; perhaps prayer isn't a crutch or an old man's bauble. Maybe it's a necessity for both the strongest and the weakest among us.

In the spring of 1854, some of my publications persuaded King Maximilian II of Bavaria to offer me, at the suggestion of Emanuel Geibel, a position in Munich with an annual salary of 1000 guilders, to take part in his so-called symposia, weekly soirees at which scholars and poets were gathered.

Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot.

The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.

There is an extraordinary degree of amity among Washington poets. They hang together. You would be hard pressed to find that in Manhattan.

There is no way of accounting for the incongruities of architects. They have their dreams, we suppose, like the poets; and failing to establish a reputation by legitimate means, they seek notoriety by eccentricities.

There's ither poets, much your betters, Far seen in Greek, deep men o' letters, Hae thought they had ensur'd their debtors, A' future ages; Now moths deform in shapeless tatters, Their unknown pages.

To be in Lyonesse, that is the question To justify the otters, is the question The dropping of the meadows, is the question I do not know the answer to the question There was a time when moorhens in the west There was a time when daylight on the top There was a time when God was not a question There was a time when poets Then I came

Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.

I have never studied the art of paying compliments to women; but I must say that if all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice for their conduct during this war.

Today, the poetics of authenticity is securely established. There have been isolated dissents from it, but no comprehensive rejection. Yet it should be clear by now that this poetics has thoroughly failed. It has made it more difficult for poets to produce major work, and its critical legacy is remarkable only for intellectual crudity and rhetorical violence. The sound of the critical madhouse is a thousand utterly authentic voices, all talking at once.

Until the twentieth century, no one had any idea that Homer might have existed in this strange and immaterial form. It was the assumption that Homer, like other poets, wrote his poetry. Virgil, Dante and Milton were merely following in his footsteps. The only debate was over why these written poems were in places written so badly. Why had he not written them better?

In my defense I have only silence, dew on the grass, a nightingale among the branches. You forgive it, its long tenure in the leaves of one aspen after another, drops of eternity, grams of amazement, and the sleepy complaints of the poor poets

The twenty-four-hour diner, the station waiting room and the motel are sanctuaries for those who have, for noble reasons, failed to find a home in the ordinary world, sanctuaries for those whom Baudelaire might have dignified with the honorific 'poets'.

Otherwise we attend to our poets when they are alive—to hear them, to praise them, to despise them, to use them. Death usually removes them. I expect my immortality to expire six minutes after my funeral. Literature is a zero-sum game.

Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.

In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old.

The most charismatic people—the poets, the mystics, the explorers—were that way because they had somehow managed to keep a bit of this light that was meant to have dimmed. But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark.

From real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from laws of nature, fancied and invented by poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual poisons, come imaginary rights, a bastard brood of monsters.

clowns got up as poets arrogant bureaucrats pedantic criers you are the standard bearers carrying faded colors being a poet isnt a matter of pride it is only an error of nature a burden to be shouldered with fear

Like the seasons of the year, like history, truth also repeats itself. But we seldom recognize it when great poets or true artists - the prophets and the priests of our day - present it to us in garments spick and span, following the fashion of the age, the slant of its fancy, the turn and temper of its mind.