Home / Topics / Poet Quotes

Poet Quotes

Browse 4287 quotes about Poet.

Poet Quotes

“It is worthwhile adding that the power of the poem to teach not only sensibilities and the subtle movements of the spirit but knowledge, real lasting felt knowledge, is going mostly unnoticed among our scholars. The body of knowledge locked into and releasable from poetry can replace practically any university in the Republic. First things first, then: the primal importance of a poem is what it can add to the individual mind.Poetry is the voice of a poet at its birth, and the voice of a people in its ultimate fulfillment as a successful and useful work of art.”

“A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.”

Body Poetry Literature Existence Identity Poet Filling Informing

Book:The Works of John Keats: With an Introduction and Bibliography

Source: The Works of John Keats: With an Introduction and Bibliography

“The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.”

Ifs Has Beens Facts Body Form Loss Common Poet Ought Cost Musician Tools Stones Fundamentals Myth Superiors Painter Symbols Substance Savages Effectiveness Pierce

Book:Tristes Tropiques

Source: Tristes Tropiques

“A life lived in chaos is an impossibility for the artist. No matter how unstructured may seem the painter's garret in Paris or the poet's pad in Greenwich Village, the artist must have some kind of order or he will proudce a very small body of work. To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.”

Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

“A poet's soul must contain the perfect shape of all things good, wise and just. His body must be spotless and without blemish, his life pure, his thoughts high, his studies intense.”

Soul Body Perfect Study Wise Poet Pure Shapes All Things Intense Good Wise

Book:Collected essays

Source: Collected essays

“Mind and body are not to be taken lightly. Their connection is intimate and mysterious, and better mapped by poets than pornographers.”

Mind Body Taken Poet Connections Mysterious Intimate Pornography Mind And Body

Author:Shana Alexander

“It may be safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.... They both speak by and to the same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed may be said to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred, and almost identical, not necessarily differing even in degree; Poetry sheds no tears "such as Angels weep," but natural and human tears; she can boast of no celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both.”

“Poetry and music I have banished, But the stupidity Of root, shoot, blossom or clay Makes no demand. I bend my body to the spade Or grope with a dirty hand.”

Body Hands Poetry Music Poet Demand Musician Roots Stupidity Dirty Clay Spades Poetry And Music Dirty Hands

Book:The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition

Source: The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition

“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity.”

Source: What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)

“I don't spend time thinking about an aesthetic out of which I create or an ideal toward which my body of work is heading. It's amazing, when I read interviews with other poets, to see how articulately they discuss their own writing, as if they were sharing long-held theories on the work of Pope or Keats. I'm happy enough that I've poured the best of myself into the poems themselves.”

Ifs Thinking Writing Long Enough Body Poet Theory Ideals Interviews Aesthetic Pope End Times Spend Time Headings

Author:Albert Goldbarth

“Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

Source: A Room of One's Own

“Once, I compared poetry to mothers in my book called To Write as a Woman, because my mother is someone who captures me in her body and gave birth to me out of her desire but washed her hands of me after giving birth to me as a poet.”

Giving Writing Book Body Hands Mother Desire Poet Birth Capture Giving Birth

Author:Kim Hyesoon

“I have no idea, actually, where I fit in, in terms of poetry camps. At AWP conferences, I have been on panels about humor, collaboration, visual poetry, confessional poetry, gender, and the body, as well as tributes to Edward Field and Albert Goldbarth. I felt at home on all of them - most poets straddle more than one school.”

Wells Has Beens Ideas Home Body School Felt Term Fields Poet Fit Gender No Idea Visuals Collaboration Camps Conferences Tribute

Author:Denise Duhamel

“The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.”

Giving Mind Body Poet Essence Prose Mind And Body Mold

Author:Virginia Woolf

“Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?”

Men Heart Body Hate Women Violence Poet Caught Hats Tangled Women's Bodies

Author:Virginia Woolf