Best poet & audience Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“If for the sake of a crowded audience you do wish to hold a lecture, your ambition is no laudable one, and at least avoid all citations from the poets, for to quote them argues feeble industry.”

Ifs Wish Audience Poet Industry Ambition Sake Arguing Lectures Crowded Citations

Book:Hippocrates

Source: Hippocrates

“If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur, it is certain that they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere -- probably more than the rest of the world combined. Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations -- many rare combinations. To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.”

Source: Delphi Complete Works of Walt Whitman (Illustrated)

“Great lecturers seldom hesitate to use dramatic tricks to enshrine their precepts in the minds of their audiences, and at Yale perhaps Chauncey B. Tinker was the most noted. To read one of his lectures was like reading a monologue of the great actress Ruth Draper--you missed the main point. You missed the drop in his voice as he approached the death in Rome of the tubercular Keats; you missed the shaking tone in which he described the poet's agony for the absent Fanny with him his love had never been consummated; you missed the grim silence of the end.”

Mind Ends Use Reading Voice Silence Audience Poet Actresses Tricks Dramatic Tone Rome Agony His Love Lectures Absent Shaking Grim Lecturer Yale Monologues Ruth

Author:Louis Auchincloss

“When you depart from standard usage, it should be deliberate and not an accidental lapse. Like a poet who breaks the rules of poetry for creative effect, this only works when you know and respect the rule you are breaking. If you have never heard of the rules you are breaking, you have no right to do so, and you are likely to come off like a buffoon or a barbarian. Breaking rules, using slang and archaic language can be effective, but it is just as likely to give you an audience busy with wincing.”

Ifs Knows Giving Should Language Break Audience Creative Heard Effects Poet Standards Busy Deliberate Barbarians Usage Lapses Slang Buffoons Breaking Rules

Author:N.D. Wilson

“Familiarity with any great thing removes our awe of it. The great general is only terrible to the enemy; the great poet is frequently scolded by his wife; the children of the great statesman clamber about his knees with perfect trust and impunity; the great actor who is called before the curtain by admiring audiences is often waylaid at the stage door by his creditors.”

Source: Delphi Complete Works of L. Frank Baum (Illustrated)

“Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time.”

Writing Persons Ideas Use Seems Talking Audience Poet Single Person

Author:Robert Graves

“To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world.”

World Way Feels Writing Culture Audience Policy Poet Hatred Celebrate Officials Staying Mutual Reach Out Sane Odds Alienation Monstrous Inhuman Humanness

Book:Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry

Source: Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry

“Poets are political, they have to be reflections of their times [because] they're living in their times... Poetry is political in that it's standing in opposition to fascism. Good poetry asks a bunch of questions and asks the audience to interact with themselves or see themselves in it; maybe you like it or you don't like it. But the fascist sort of stuff plays on your fears and tells you to jump on the party line and gives some simple excuses - blame this person.”

Giving Persons Play Political Asks Stuff Lines Simple Party Audience Poet Reflection Standing Blame Excuse Bunch Opposition Poetry Is Fascism Fascists You Like It Good Poetry Time Poetry

Author:John Cusack

“I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to require a critical intermediary - a "spokescritic." I want my poems to be independently meaningful moments of power for a good reader. And that's the expectation I initially bring to other poets' writing.”

“When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art.”

Way Giving Writing Art Actors Audience Poet Performances Singers Not Interested Readership

Author:James Arthur

“The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets.”

Men Writing Mean States Facts Beautiful Young Powerful Secret Audience Imagine Poet Bed Ideals Fellows Dinner Young Man Invites Cafeteria Myopic

Author:W. H. Auden

“I'm more than a little suspicious of humor in poems, because I think it can at times be a way of getting a reaction out of a reader, or an audience, that is something closer to relief: i.e., thank god this isn't poetry, but stand-up comedy. Some poets are really funny, but more often poets are fourth rate stand up comics at best. But they benefit from the sheer relief of the audience.”

Thinking Way Littles Audience Comedy Poet Reader Benefits Rate Reactions Relief Thank God Fourth Sheer Suspicious Stand Up Comedy

Author:Matthew Zapruder

“There's always been what I would call the William Carlos Williams strain, in which poems of simplicity and clarity are valued by a different community. I was talking to Galway Kinnell one day, and he said that there was an audience for poetry up until about 1920 and then, from that point on, the poets and the critics drifted.”

Different Community Audience Poet One Day Critics Simplicity Clarity

Author:Ted Kooser

“Part of the pleasure of giving a reading comes from the rapport between the audience and the poet. I don't want to get mystical here, but there's an energy flow that begins with the poet, and the energy goes out to the audience, and they're energized, and then they return that energy to the poet. As someone standing up there alone, facing these people, I can feel that rapport (or its absence).”

People Giving Reading Energy Pleasure Audience Poet Absence Mystical Rapport

Author:Ron Padgett

“My goals as an artist have nothing to do with speaking to an audience. I love to have a good time, but when it comes to poetry I'm not really interested in writing poetry that seeks to entertain or operate safely within the mainstream and, to be clear, I'm not disparaging the really phenomenal work that does - it's just not my interest as a poet.”

Writing Artist Goal Interest Audience Poet Good Times Having A Good Time Phenomenal Writing Poetry

Author:Dawn Lundy Martin

“I wanted to write not exclusively for (or against) poets or scholars, though many of them are people, too! But that was not my primary audience. It was that person you like who tells you they don't get poetry, and you think to yourself, aw man, what can I do for this good person?”

People Thinking Men Writing Audience Poet Scholar Good Person

Author:Matthew Zapruder

“People probably long for something genuinely personal in a society where the personal is often indistinguishable from the "personalized." Maybe the poetry audience member is searching for his or her own "personal space" and they expect the poet to be a sort of avatar of the private life. But that sort of representation is distasteful to me. Asking a poet to represent the personal life is, paradoxically, to turn the poet into something other than a person.”

People Long Audience Poet Representation Personal Life Distasteful Personal Space

Author:Rae Armantrout

“Poets tend to form loose groups - the "Romantics" or the "Imagists". And sometimes they write manifestoes in the name of these groups. This can be good. It forces the poet and the audience to think. But it can also be dangerous. It can turn into a branding device so that potential readers believe they know all they need to know once they know you've been associated with a certain group or position. It can freeze things in place. That's where thinking stops.”

Thinking Writing Believe Sometimes Audience Dangerous Poet Be Good Branding

Author:Rae Armantrout

“To have great poets, there must be great audiences.”

Science Poetry History Audience Learning Poet Discovery Poetic Great Poet Great Poetry Poetry By Famous Poets

Book:Prose Works 1892, Volume II: Collect and Other Prose

Source: Prose Works 1892, Volume II: Collect and Other Prose

Poet Quotes

Related topics

Poet Quotes