Best poet & ifs Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 2

“Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.”

Ifs Littles Courses Common Poet Understood Herds Grind Daily Grind

Book:Poems, New and Collected, 1957-1997

Source: Poems, New and Collected, 1957-1997

“If you want poets in space, you'll have to wait.”

Ifs Want Waiting Space Poet

Author:Buzz Aldrin

“Moscow, Rome, London, Paris stay in place. Leningrad and New York float, spreading all their sails, cutting space with their prows, and can disappear, if not in reality, then in the imagination of the poet creating a myth, a mythical tradition on the grounds of his secret experience.”

Ifs Reality Imagination Space Secret Cities Cutting New York Poet Creating Tradition Myth Disappear London Paris Rome Sail Floats Moscow Leningrad

Author:Nina Berberova

“Language becomes a prison house only poets can escape...if we do not reject any strict distinctions between ordinary usage and figures of speech.”

Ifs House Language Figures Poet Speech Ordinary Prison Distinction Rejects Strict Usage Figures Of Speech

Author:Arthur Quinn

“It is as if the soul of the continent is weeping. Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the buffalo. It weeps for magic that has been forgotten. It weeps for the decline of poets.It weepsfor the black people who think like white people.It weepsfor the Indians who think like settlers.It weepsfor the children who think like adults.It weepsfor the free who think like prisoners.Most of all, it weepsfor the cowgirls who think like cowboys.”

People Ifs Thinking Children Doe Has Beens Soul Black White Magic Poet Adults Forgotten Bones Prisoner Black People Decline Continents Cowboy Weeping Buffalo Settlers Cowgirls

Author:Tom Robbins

“If everybody became a poet the world would be much better. We would all read to each other.”

Ifs World Would Be Poet

Book:Conversations with Nikki Giovanni

Source: Conversations with Nikki Giovanni

“If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.”

Ifs World Years Two Character Home Lasts Found Waiting Cases Comedy Wife Poet Hundred Critics Queens Opera Merry Queen Elizabeth True Home Windsor Falstaff Verdi

Author:W. H. Auden

“Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies.”

“I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.”

Ifs Writing Wonder Wife New York Poet Reader Smart Ideals My Wife Very Smart

Author:Kenneth Koch

“Here! 'Not thread nor glue, not nails nor screws, will ever self and shadow wed.' Helpful, those poet-types. Perhaps this one: 'Seek the grimy queen of dread machines, if you your errant shadow miss.' Now that's quite good! As a Prophetic Utterance, Third Class (Vague Hints and Mysterious Signs), you couldn't ask for better. It's downright plain-spoken!”

Source: The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

“If I were poet now, I would not resist the temptation to trace my life back through the delicate shadows of my childhood to the precious and sheltered sources of my earliest memories. But these possessions are far too dear and sacred for the person I now am to spoil for myself. All there is to say of my childhood is that it was good and happy. I was given the freedom to discover my own inclinations and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength.”

“Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, "If science can't do something therefore religion can.”

Ifs Writing Mean Simple Practice Poet Logical Sonnet Fallacy Logical Fallacy

Author:Richard Dawkins

“But Thee, but Thee, O sovereign Seer of time, But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue, But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love, O perfect life in perfect labor writ, O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest, -- What IF or YET, what mole, what flaw, what lapse, What least defect or shadow of defect, What rumor, tattled by an enemy, Of inference loose, what lack of grace Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's -- Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, Jesus, good Paragon, Thou Crystal Christ?”

Source: Poems of Sidney Lanier

“Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.”

Ifs Way May Littles Art Matter Poetry Style Poet Concerned

Book:Collected Poetry and Prose

Source: Collected Poetry and Prose

“When oxygen and sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence of a filiament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum.”

Ifs Mind Art Form Poetry Poet Combination Nevertheless Oxygen Acid Platinum

Book:Selected essays

Source: Selected essays

“Don't feel guilty if you don't immediately love your stepchildren as you do your own, or as much as you think you should. Everyoneneeds time to adjust to the new family, adults included. There is no such thing as an "instant parent." Actually, no concrete object lies outside of the poetic sphere as long as the poet knows how to use the object properly.”

“If you want to understand poetry, You have to go to its origin, If you want to understand the poet, You have to go to the Poet's home.”

Ifs Want Home Poetry Poet Interpretation

Author:Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“I don't know if I call myself a poet or not. I would like to, but I'm not really qualified to make that decision, because I come in on such a back door, that I don't know what a Robert Frost or a [John] Keats or a T.S. Eliot would really think of my stuff.”

Ifs Thinking Knows Stuff Decision Doors Poet Qualified Frost Back Doors Eliot

Author:Bob Dylan

“When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell's major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.”

Ifs Feels Art Enough Hands Love Is Century Mines Poet Holy Majors Supreme Idolatry Nineteenth Century Cromwell

Book:Three Plays for Puritans

Source: Three Plays for Puritans

“Some moralist or mythological poet Compares the solitary soul to a swan; I am satisfied with that, Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it, Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.”

Ifs Soul Shows Life Is Beauty Gone Poet Mirrors Proof Satisfied Compare Solitary Swans Gleam Moralist

Book:The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats

“Ovid lies here, the poet, skilled in love's gentle sport; By his own talents he worked his undoing. Oh, you who pass by, if ever you have loved, Think it not a burden to wish him calm repose.”

Ifs Thinking Love Lying Wish Sports Talent Poet Calm Burden Gentle Repose Undoing

Author:Ovid

“Charity, like poetry, should be cultivated, if only for its being graceful.”

Ifs Should Poetry Grace Poet Charity

Book:The Confidence-Man

Source: The Confidence-Man

“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.”

Ifs Thinking Used Poetry Found Morning Poet Accounts Delight Copies Occupation Contrast Verses Volume Charming Introduction Dictionary Johnson Pillow Amused Reciting

Book:A New England girlhood

Source: A New England girlhood

“The definition of good prose is proper words in their proper places; of good verse, the most proper words in their proper places.The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.”

Ifs Poetry Attention Cases Poet Ought Faults Definitions Prose Relative Verses Propriety

Book:Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge: In Two Volumes

Source: Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge: In Two Volumes

“POET If not in a place, where are the People weeping? LIBERAL They creep weeping in the face, not place. POET Is it something with which we may cope The weeping, the creeping, the peepee-ing, the peeping?”

People Ifs May Faces Poet Weeping Creeps Peeping

Book:Poems, 1920-1945: A Selection

Source: Poems, 1920-1945: A Selection

“If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet.”

Ifs Writing Wells Hands Choices Failing Poet Duty Obligation Well Being Minorities Oblivion

Author:Joseph Brodsky

“The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.”

Ifs Art Play Poetry Understanding Imagination Serious Poet Speech Rhetoric Conducting Serious Business Free Play

Book:Kant's Critiques

Source: Kant's Critiques

“Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean.”

“If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.”

Ifs Poet

Book:Countee Cullen: Collected Poems: (American Poets Project #32)

Source: Countee Cullen: Collected Poems: (American Poets Project #32)

“A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.”

Source: A Mathematician's Apology

“And we may be led, then, upward through more Powerful forms of poetry, past columns With peeling posters on them, to the country of indifference. Meanwhile if the swell diapasons, blooms Unhappily and too soon, the little people are nonetheless real.”

People Ifs May Littles Art Real Country Past Form Poetry Powerful Poet Indifference Columns Posters Peeling

Book:Selected poems

Source: Selected poems

“If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him.”

Ifs Poet Fine Genius Criticism Criticize Odds Reckoning

Author:Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Poet, forger of ideals, dreamer among the possibilities of life, prophet of the millenium, do you get impatient with the prosaic life around you -- the dulness, and the earthliness, and the brutishness of men? Fret not. Go forward into the realm which stretches before you; climb the highest mountain you can reach, and plant a cross there. The nations will come up to it some day. Work for immortality if you will; then wait for it. If your own age fail to recognize you, a coming age will not.”

Ifs Men Age Nations Waiting Failing Possibility Poet Mountain Highest Ideals Crosses Plant Come Up Immortality Realms Prophet Climbs Dreamer Impatient

Author:J. G. Holland

“To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.”

Ifs Joy Turns Generations Youth Poet Grateful Males Sensibility My Generation

Author:W. H. Auden

“If one believes philosophers, then what we call religion is only a deliberately popularized or an instinctively artless philosophy. Poets seem to consider religion rather as a variation of poetry which by misjudging its proper beautiful game takes itself too seriously and one-sidedly. Philosophy, however, admits and recognizes that it can begin and complete itself only with religion. Poetry seeks only to strive for the infinite and despises worldly utility and culture, which are the true antitheses of religion. Eternal peace among artists is thus not far away.”

“Drill in exact translation is an excellent way of disposing the mind against that looseness and exaggeration with which the sensationalists have corrupted our world. If schools of journalism knew their business, they would graduate no one who could not render the Greek poets.”

Ifs World Way Mind School Poet Journalism Excellent Greek Our World Graduates Translations Exaggeration Drills Looseness

Book:Ideas Have Consequences

Source: Ideas Have Consequences

“Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female, you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made at least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time.”

Ifs Feels Years Made Would Be Running Felt Example Serious Poet Female Twenties Suicide Thirty Helpful Twenty One Running Out Of Time Plath

Author:Margaret Atwood

“The great thing about living until you get a bit older if you are a writer, and especially a poet, is that you have more life to reflect on. And I think that if I am better now - and I think that I am probably better than I was - is because that I simply have more to think about, more to get under control, more to understand.”

Ifs Thinking Bits Poet Great Things Better Now

Author:Clive James

“I share my life experiences as a poet with my students. My poetic difficulties, joys, struggles and discoveries. If I read a new poem or essay or book I'm excited about, I bring it in.”

Ifs Book Joy Struggle Share Students Poet Discovery Difficulty Excited Poetic Life Experience Essays

Author:Dorianne Laux

“If I were a teacher, I would like to teach freshman English - so I could be the Robin Williams type in Dead Poets Society. I wanna be that guy. I couldn't teach seniors because they'd be smarter than me.”

Ifs Guy Teach Teacher Poet Type Smarter Senior That Guy Robins Freshman Dead Poets Society Dead Poets

Author:Jake M. Johnson

“Anyone who wants to be a writer should, if given the opportunity, hang out with "real writers," that is, poets or writers who are lions in literature, semi-lions, or published authors.”

Ifs Want Should Real Literature Opportunity Given Poet Hanging Out Lions

Author:Kirby Wright

“If the poet spun for half an hour daily, his poetry would gain in richness.”

Ifs Hours Half Poet Gains Richness Spun

Book:The Quintessence of Gandhi in His Own Words

Source: The Quintessence of Gandhi in His Own Words

“You can't criticize Bob Dylan's singing. You have to respect Billy Joel as a brilliant poet. You can't tell me there's a better rock band ever than Led Zeppelin. And if you speak during the Eagles' "Last Resort," we're done. I'm just asking for seven minutes. This stuff really matters, you know.”

Ifs Knows Matter Done Lasts Speak Stuff Minutes Rocks Poet Band Singing Asking Seven Brilliant Criticize Bob Resorts Dylan Eagles Rock Bands Zeppelins

Author:Charlie Sheen

“When I was a kid I would write songs, little plays, and poetry in school. If you're an adult and you're a poet, it's all about love and pain, but if you're a kid it's, "Does anyone know a word that rhymes with shark?"”

Ifs Knows Writing Littles Doe Play Humor Kids School Funny Pain Song Poet Adults Rhyme Sharks Love And Pain

Author:Mike Birbiglia

“I grow very impatient with prose writers who don't pay attention to the cadence of the sentence. If you start as a poet, you're wooed by the music of language; you want to put that into your practice.”

Ifs Want Language Grows Pay Attention Practice Poet Sentences Pay Attention Prose Impatient Cadence

Author:Alison Hawthorne Deming

“In America, where you'd have thought the country's so huge it couldn't happen quite so cosily, everyone's giving his imprimatur to everyone else. You line up three or four well-known poets and a couple of eminent academics on the dustjacket, and the rest of academe follow like sheep. That's death really, if you take pleasure in it. Mind you, the occasional puff's hard to resist, but you shouldn't inhale.”

Ifs Giving Mind Wells Country Hard Happens America Three Lines Pleasure Known Four Poet Huge Couple Sheep Well Known Occasional Puff Inhale

Author:Michael Longley

“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

“I don't think I'd ever get any better as a poet if I didn't push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise me, as they should, but I fight them at every turn, possibly just because I'm stubborn.”

Ifs Thinking Should Turns Fighting Grows Poet Surprise Stubborn Surprise Me Best Poem

Author:James Arthur

“You can publish a poem you think is a very important poem, and you don't hear a word from anyone. [...] You can publish a book of poetry by dropping it off a cliff and waiting to hear an echo. Quite often, you'll never hear a thing. So doing that, using older work, puts it in a context, and that sort of forces the reader to realize what its importance is-if it has any. Everything needs a context. You're not going to recognize a poet unless you have a context.”

Ifs Thinking Needs Important Book Force Waiting Realizing Poet Reader Importance Echoes Publish Cliffs Dropping

Author:Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“In England especially, poetry's woven into the background fabric of society. And in Ireland, it's in the foreground. The place of the poet in Irish society is enormous. If you say you're a poet in Ireland, you'd better know what you're doing, because the standard and the expectations are incredibly high.”

Ifs Knows Poet Standards Expectations England Backgrounds Enormous Ireland Fabric Woven Foreground

Author:David Whyte

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