“Someone told me just recently that poets are eulogists. It's their job, to eulogize. I didn't know that, but it makes sense. Because in almost every poem of mine there is a loss.” KnowsJobsLossMinesPoetMake Sense Author:Dan Quisenberry
“I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.” PeopleFeelsPoetryMinesPoetRelation Author:Robert Graves
“The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valery once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.” MindHardHelpingPastProduceMinesPoetMaterialsExpectationsTasksBasesSavedAnticipationClueGenerator Author:Daniel Dennett
“Five golden years, Heart of Mine, have we walked the way of life together, and there is not an hour I would have changed; there is no moment when I would have you other than you have been. It is the fashion these days, I know, to say that love ends at the altar, but it is not so. You and I have found the old dream of the world divinely true. It is neither a poet's fancy nor a trick of the imagination, but a thing of fadeless and unending beauty.” KnowsWorldWayYearsHeartHas BeensEndsMomentsDreamTogetherFoundHoursImaginationFiveFashionChangedMinesPoetTricksGoldenThese DaysFancyAltarsUnendingLife TogetherGolden Years Book:Later Love Letters of a Musician Source: Later Love Letters of a Musician
“Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.” LooksDreamMinesPoetReaderCurious Author:W. H. Auden
“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.” IfsFeelsArtEnoughHandsLove IsCenturyMinesPoetHolyMajorsSupremeIdolatryNineteenth CenturyCromwell Book:Three Plays for Puritans Source: Three Plays for Puritans
“I have never injured anybody with a mordant poem; my verse contains charges against nobody. Ingenuous, I have shunned wit steeped in venom--not a letter of mine is dipped in poisonous jest.” PoetryMinesPoetLettersWitVersesInjuredPoisonousJestVenom Author:Ovid
“A friend of mine, a poet, Rebecca Wolff recently said to me, "You know, your stories are really voice-driven," and I guess I knew that already, but it's so true that I can't get something going unless I can hear the voice.” KnowsSaidI CanStoriesVoiceMinesPoetDrivenRebecca Author:Lynne Tillman