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Poet Quotes

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Poet Quotes

“The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman.”

“Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.”

“[Rhyme is] but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter; ... Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme, ... as have also long since our best English tragedies, as... trivial and of no true musical delight; which [truly] consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory.”

“S. E. Smith's I Live in a Hut has a deceptively simple title, considering that the brain in that hut contains galaxies-worth of invention: At night when your soldiers are praying ceaselessly for less rain and more underwear my soldiers make underwear out of rain. These poems seesaw between despair and delight but delight is winning the battle. Smith is a somersaulting tightrope walker of a poet and her poems will make you look at anything and everything with new eyes: For days I tried to rub the new freckle // off my hand until I realized what it was / and began to grant it its sovereignty.”

“One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace; he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe.”

“Seeking the Cave is part travelogue, part literary history, and part spiritual journey. James Lenfestey is a lively and entertaining tour guide. Modest, funny, curious, and wide open to the world, he gives us perceptive glimpses of Chinese culture, ancient to contemporary, and into what it means to be a poet, both now and twelve centuries ago. The account of his quest to find Han Shan's cave is a delight from beginning to end.”

“A tattered copy of Johnson's large Dictionary was a great delight to me, on account of the specimens of English versifications which I found in the Introduction. I learned them as if they were so many poems. I used to keep this old volume close to my pillow; and I amused myself when I awoke in the morning by reciting its jingling contrasts of iambic and trochaic and dactylic metre, and thinking what a charming occupation it must be to "make up" verses.”

“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”