Quotes About Poets

Then, since all great poets are strange in their speech and actions, he must have achieved great fame, for his actions and conversations were the strangest of any man I ever knew.

Poets always hate those in power. To them perfection is always just behind the last corner, or beyond the next. They escape the present in dreams of the past and future.

Many of the haiku poets gave their poems brief superscriptions that function like Ginsberg's titles to create a context.

In 388 B.C. Plato urged the city fathers of Athens to exile all poets and storytellers. They are a threat to society

We're Irish, messed up, superstitious and unorganizable…but, by God, you don't see any poets coming out of Ulster.

So anyhow, all your goddamn poets will write tired sonnets about the good old days when the noblemen kicked the piss out of the peasants and the peasants kicked the piss out of the Jews.

No weird cultural aberration produced Nazism. No intellectual lunatic fringe miraculously overwhelmed a civilized country. It is modern philosophy—not some peripheral aspect of it, but the most central of its mainstreams—which turned the Germans into a nation of killers. The land of poets and philosophers was brought down by its poets and philosophers.

Germany has been called "the land of poets and philosophers." But its education offered the country no protection against the Sergeant Molls in its ranks.

Or again, exegesis of The Waste Land often reads remarkably like the psychoanalytic interpretation of a dream, yet we know that Eliot's methods were prepared for him not by Freud but by other poets.

There may be no book on the mothers of poets, or artists in general, but it might one day be written and would be, I think, an enlightening read.

Aphrodite, Aphrodite--I am sick of hearing poets sing her praise. "Violet-crowned, the golden, laughter-loving one..." How she sets their hearts a-twitter! And they call her "Queen of Love"--what folly. If love is like a firefly that flits about and quickly fades, then let her be its queen. If love is sacred, and endures, then it is my domain.

He learned from the Greek poets "not to expect too much from life; not to dream of a chimerical bliss, ... but to do his duty, without expecting to be rewarded ..., to cultivate his friends and love his country even to the point of self sacrifice." From ancient writers he learned the possibility of courageous resignation, and under their inspiration he worked out for himself a program which was little short of the heroic.

Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.

Metaphor is the literal language of the soul. Poets do not try "to think up metaphors." They are not interested in making up riddles for the rest of us to figure out. They think in metaphors.

Somehow Jack's call for participation on a couple of local biotech hacker forums had gotten reposted to an artists' mailing list, and a bunch of poets showed up to argue with them about the true meaning of anarchy.

All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life. Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars. And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things?

Probably I am a fool…most poets are fools…but for some reason I love faith, but have none.

Junior writers $300; Minor poets—$500 a week; Broken novelists—$850-1000; One play dramatists—$1500; Sucks—$2000. Wits—$2500.

As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets.

Os poetas místicos são filósofos doentes,  E os filósofos são homens doidos.

To be adept at deluding oneself is the first prerequisite for a statesman. Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.

Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.

Pleasure has ever more been represented by poets and by painters as clothed in perpetual smiles and adorned with the richest jewels; and in real life, we have known many who, allured by her deceptions, blandishments, and hollow but showy temptations, have followed as she pointed until ruin has befallen them.

The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, 'A civilization is judged only in its decline.' That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players.