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Poet Quotes

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Poet Quotes

“Know that there is often hidden in us a dormant poet, always young and alive.”

Knows Young Alive Poet Dormant

Author:Alfred de Musset

“The world is full of people who have lost faith: politicians who have lost faith in politics, social workers who have lost faith in social work, schoolteachers who have lost faith in teaching and, for all I know, policemen who have lost faith in policing and poets who have lost faith in poetry. It's a condition of faith that it gets lost from time to time, or at least mislaid.”

People Knows World Faith Lost Social Teaching Conditions Poet Politician Workers Social Work Policemen Social Worker Lost Faith

Book:A Taste for Death

Source: A Taste for Death

“genius is original, unique; and in whatever form it may develop itself is the greatest gift that can be given to man, the strongest known link between the material life we have and the spiritual life that we can only guess at. Every great poet, painter, or musician - every inventor or man of science, every fine actor or orator, comes to us as the exponent of something diviner than we know. We cannot understand it, but we feel it, and acknowledge it.”

“I don't like realism. We already know the real facts about li[fe], most of the basic facts. I'm not interested in repeating what we already know. We know about sex, about violence, about murder, about war. All these things, by the time we're 18, we're up to here. From there on we need interpreters. We need poets. We need philosophers. We need theologians, who take the same basic facts and work with them and help us make do with those facts. Facts alone are not enough. It's interpretation.”

Knows Needs War Real Enough Facts Helping Sex Violence Poet Murder Philosopher Interpretation Not Interested Realism Theologian Interpreter

Author:Ray Bradbury

“What comics sacrifice and what lives they live - I know that most of their lives, their adult lives, they're sitting around or walking around with notebooks, writing things down. Usually they're fairly sensitive. Usually they're very bright. And that makes them poets.”

Knows Writing Sacrifice Poet Walking Sitting Adults Sensitive Notebook Sitting Around Writing Things Down

Author:Marc Maron

“I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.”

Thinking Knows World Should Poet University Academic Workshops

Author:Adrienne Rich

“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

“Many people I know - writers, poets - they have all been sentenced not once but sometimes three times after they come out. They serve five or six years, come out another time, and then nine years. Come out again, 12 years. Only because they have a different opinion. They are innocent people, they have beautiful minds, beautiful hearts.”

People Knows Years Mind Heart Different Sometimes Beautiful Three Opinion Five Poet Six Nine Innocent Three Times Nine Years Another Time Beautiful Heart Different Opinions Beautiful Mind

Author:Ai Weiwei

“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

“Every poet has a certain amount of "stuff." That's what you draw from for imagery. The more stuff you know well, not simply intellectually but sensually, emotionally, intimately, the wider the pool from which you draw.”

Knows Wells Certain Stuff Poet Amount Draws Pool Imagery

Author:Marge Piercy

“Bangladesh is a world of metaphor, of high and low theater, of great poetry and music. You talk to a rice farmer and you find a poet. You get to know a sweeper of the streets and you find a remarkable singer.”

Knows World Streets Poet Lows Theater Metaphor Singers Remarkable Farmers Rice Great Poet Bangladesh Highs And Lows Great Poetry Poetry And Music Sweepers

Author:Jean Houston

“I once got a postcard from a French poet who wrote - "you don't know me but I'm always very grumpy when I get up in morning. But when I get up now I put the tea kettle on, and when it starts to sing it makes me smile - goddamn you!" That's what happened when we first designed it - we got a lot of mail.”

Knows Firsts Morning Happened Poet Get Up Tea Mail Know Me Postcards Kettles Grumpy Make Me Smile You Don't Know Me

Author:Michael Graves

“A poet is seldom hard up for advice. The worst part of it all is that sometimes the advice is coming from other poets, and they ought to know better.”

Knows Sometimes Hard Worst Advice Poet Ought

Author:Richard Hugo

“You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.”

Knows Years Wells Enough Certain Poet Amount Maturity Sixteen Sixteen Year Olds

Author:Erica Jong

“I know as well as thee that I am no poet born It is a trade, I never learnt nor indeed could learn If I make verses-'tis in spite Of nature and my stars I write.”

Ifs Knows Writing Wells Stars Born Poet Trade Thee Spite Verses

Book:The wit and wisdom of Benjamin Franklin: a treasury of more than 900 quotations and anecdotes

Source: The wit and wisdom of Benjamin Franklin: a treasury of more than 900 quotations and anecdotes

“Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.”

Knows Soul Wanted Alive Poet Quiet Do You Know Legends Cicadas

Book:G. John Berger

Source: G. John Berger

“A poet is deeply conflicted and it's in his work that he reconciles those deep conflicts. The place is the harbor. It doesn't set the world in order, you know, it's the place of reconciliation. It's the Consolamentum, the kiss of peace.”

Knows World Order Poet Conflict Kissing Reconciliation Harbors Reconcile

Author:Irving Layton

“Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards...I don't know if anyone's reading it, but poets are still flying around the country going from lectern to lectern.That circuitry has become very well-established.”

Ifs Knows Wells Stills Country Moments Reading Given Poet Flying Airplane Headings American Life

Author:Billy Collins

“The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.”

Thinking Knows Want Actors Poet Actresses Thrive Poetry Is Composer Actors And Actresses

Author:George Bernard Shaw

“Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course - being also a novelist - am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?”

Knows Should Believe Persons Said Lying Courses Five Subjects Poet Ideals Versions Novelists Liars Republic Truthful Believe In Me Autobiography Plato Tempted Excluded

Author:Margaret Atwood

“My question is "when did other people give up the idea of being a poet?" You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?”

People Knows Giving Writing Stills Ideas Real Kids Poet Giving Up Puzzles Real Questions

Book:Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer's Vocation

Source: Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer's Vocation

“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of stars-mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? ...What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it.”

Knows Feels Littles Doe Past Artist Night Stars Mystery Poet Mere Patterns Harm Desert Gas Atoms Marvelous

Author:Richard P. Feynman

“Poets like Shakespeare know more about poetry than any $25 an hour man.”

Knows Men Hours Poet

Author:Robert Frost

“As playwrights, as poets, we have to look to ourselves, listen to our guts for the final answers about what changes to make. Everyone has advice about how to end your play differently. And it's not about right or wrong. At the end of the day, it's your baby and you know what's best.”

Knows Looks Ends Play Answers Advice Poet Baby Finals Guts The End Of The Day Playwright

Author:Stephen Karam

“Words are heavy in Turkey, and every writer, every poet and every journalist knows that, because of a word, because of a sentence, because of a tweet or even a retweet, you can be sued, you can be demonized by the media and you can even land in prison.”

Knows Land Media Poet Prison Heavy Sentences Journalist Turkeys Tweet Retweet

Author:Elif Safak

“Americans would have a right to go to war with the Iraqis if we could name one author from Iraq. It disturbs me that we're going to war with somebody we know absolutely nothing about. Name one Iraqi poet, one Iraqi woman activist, one Iraqi singer. Name one Iraqi novelist. You can't. And how can you go kill someone you don't know anything about?”

Ifs Knows War Names Poet Iraq Singers Novelists Activist Absolutely Nothing Going To War

Author:Jimmy Santiago Baca

“One of my favorite artists is Tom Waits, whom most people think of as a wonderful singer-songwriter and a great poet. I certainly think of him that way, but I also know him as a terrific actor. You know, that persona that he puts on when he's doing his music comes from being an actor, figuring out a persona.”

People Thinking Knows Way Artist Actors Waiting Wonderful Poet My Favorite Singers Toms Songwriters Terrific Persona Singer Songwriters Great Poet Favorite Artist

Author:Jeff Bridges

“Poets know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.”

Knows Heart Running Passion Know How Poet Broken Publication

Book:The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays

Source: The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays

“I'm primarily a poet, so I'd have to say in my case I'd investigate the mystery in poetry in a different way than prose might investigate it, in a way that includes the power of the music of language and maybe more imaginatively in poetry, but I don't really know about better or worse. I guess it depends on the writer.”

Knows Way Different Might Language Cases Mystery Poet Depends Different Ways Prose

Author:Pattiann Rogers

“There are poets who believe that you shouldn't engage at all in any cause. And there's something to be said for that. Because you don't want to - I think most political poetry is very bad. And it's very bad because you know too much to start with. You have a sense that you're right, and you're trying to tell other people what's right. And I think that's always kind of fundamentalism, and I don't like it.”

People Thinking Knows Want Trying Believe Kind Said Political Causes Too Much Poet Poetry Is Fundamentalism

Author:W. S. Merwin

“The artist looks for a subject. You know, a lot of new poets don't seem to have a subject. I don't totally understand that.”

Knows Looks Seems Artist Subjects Poet

Author:Gerald Stern

“I think a lot of American poets are swimming-pool Soviets. A lot of them have taken the comfortable, self-protective route too often. I know that I certainly have. That's easy to do.”

Thinking Knows Self Easy Taken Poet Comfortable Swimming Pool Routes Protective Swimming Pool

Author:Sam Hamill

“Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing.”

Ifs Knows Writing Beautiful Moving Language Lines Havens Poet Reader Skins Clean Sentences Target Chasing English Language Joyce

Author:Teju Cole

“I alwaysthought of myself as a competent, minor poet. I know who I'm up against.”

Knows Poet Minors Competent

Author:Leonard Cohen

“So, the process of revision, it's not systematic. But for me, I mean, I know a lot of poets who write out a draft and then revise it and I think they're happier people. But, I'm just not able to do it that way. I need to just continually examine it as I do it.”

People Thinking Knows Way Needs Writing Mean Able Process Poet Systematic Revision

Author:Edward Hirsch

“That is many poets don't know how to tell a story and they don't have a sense of how to put things in order to tell a story and we thought the poets could learn from fiction writers something about developing a character over time who wasn't just you and also creating a narrative structure.”

Knows Character Stories Order Fiction Know How Poet Creating Structure Developing Narrative Fiction Writers Narrative Structure

Author:Edward Hirsch

“As a reader I don't distinguish between confessional and non-confessional work. After all, how do we even know that certain "I" poems are confessional? It's a tricky business, this correlating of the speaker and the poet.”

Knows Certain Poet Reader Speakers Tricky

Author:Matthea Harvey

“As we all know, poets are born brain-wired a certain way and every poet I know wrote as a child. I'm no exception.”

Knows Way Children Certain Born Brain Poet Exception

Author:Grace Cavalieri

“I had to learn quick, because I was performing in Cinco de Mayo festivals with babies crying and people lifting their beers, and you know the feather dancers would come, and they'd say, "What are you, a poet? You're next".”

People Knows Next Cry Poet Baby Beer Performing Dancer Feathers Festivals Lifting Cinco De Mayo

Author:Sandra Cisneros

“I know that in some ways I operate from a kind of antiquated interest in imagery, while many contemporary poets are not so interested in imagery. I think part of it is my training, and just my visual sense of things.”

Thinking Knows Way Kind Interest Poet Training Contemporary Visuals Imagery

Author:Martha Ronk

“You have to be a poet to know how to write a song with lyrics.”

Knows Writing Song Know How Poet

Author:Petra Haden

“Signs of a maddening system of writing and counting that calibrates the values of something the poet does not yet know. Praxis is therefore poetics.”

Knows Writing Doe Values Poet Counting Praxis

Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim

“I really think kids should understand that music is like learning the alphabet. You put small letters together to make words, and then you use these words to create a story, but with music. And they really need to know how to mix and match those letters and how to come up with something that is really interesting, or speak in metaphors as poets do to show us something maybe we didn't think about.”

Thinking Knows Needs Should Stories Use Shows Kids Together Speak Interesting Know How Poet Music Is Letters Metaphor Come Up Really Interesting Alphabet

Author:Terry Bozzio

“When I hear Khmer poets, when they recite their poems, I know what they're talking about, I get it right away.”

Knows Talking Poet

Author:Chath Piersath

“As a poet who has the tools for interpreting the poem differently, you can begin to deconstruct it. But the human being who's like, "I know about conversation, I know about language, I know about hard times," will approach the poem differently.”

Knows Humans Hard Language Human Beings Poet Conversation Approach Tools Hard Times Interpreting

Author:Jacqueline Woodson

“I don't know that I had a sense that there was such a thing as "the poetry world" in the 1960s and early 70s. Maybe poets did, but for me as an onlooker and reader of poetry, poetry felt like it was part of a larger literary world. I mean, even the phrase "the poetry world" reflects a sort of balkanization of American literary and artistic life that has to some extent happened since then.”

Knows World Mean Felt Happened Poet Reader Artistic Phrases 1960s Artistic Life

Author:Robert Hass

“These days, most of my interactions with young people are centered on the poetry or theater classes I teach, so the students I know are reading contemporary poets (they love Willie Perdomo) and scripts (No Child, by Nilaja Sun and Twilight by Anna Deavere Smith). I don't know their reading habits outside of our class, but I believe that they enjoy stories that they can relate to, learn from, be challenged by - you know, the usual good writing that every reader craves.”

“For the rhapsode ought to interpret the mind of the poet to his hearers, but how can he interpret him well unless he knows what he means?”

Knows Mind Wells Mean Poet Ought

Book:Plato: The Complete Works: From the greatest Greek philosopher, known for The Republic, Symposium, Apology, Phaedrus, Laws, Crito, Phaedo, Timaeus, Meno, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Parmenides, Protagoras, Statesman and Critias

Source: Plato: The Complete Works: From the greatest Greek philosopher, known for The Republic, Symposium, Apology, Phaedrus, Laws, Crito, Phaedo, Timaeus, Meno, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Parmenides, Protagoras, Statesman and Critias

“For not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us.”

Knows Mind May Doe Art States Use Order Speak Known Divine Poet Holy Ministers Prophet Theme Speakers Priceless Unconsciousness Holy Prophet

Author:Plato