Browse 4287 quotes about Poet.
“The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts.”
Source: The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde
“Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.”
“Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.”
Source: The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde
“In autumn, when the leaves are brown,
Take pen and ink, and write it down.”
Source: Through the Looking-Glass
“Unhappie Verse, the witnesse of my unhappie state,
Make thy selfe fluttring wings of thy fast flying
Thought”
Source: The Works of Edmund Spenser: With a Selection of Notes from Various Commentators; and a Glossarial Index: to which is Prefixed, Some Account of the Life of Spenser
“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.”
“... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence.”
“I should tell you that honestly, on my honour of a Nearwicked, I always think in a wordworth's of that primed favourite continental poet, Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper, A.G., whom the generality admoyers in this that is and that this is to come.”
Source: The Complete Works of James Joyce: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Poetry, Essays & Letters: Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnegan’s Wake, Dubliners, The Cat and the Devil, Exiles, Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach, Stephen Hero, Giacomo Joyce, Critical Writings & more
“The philosophic mind inclines always to an elaborate life--the life of Goethe or of Leonardo da Vinci; but the life of the poet isintense--the life of Blake or of Dante--taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.”
Source: The Complete Works of James Joyce: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Poetry, Essays & Letters: Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnegan’s Wake, Dubliners, The Cat and the Devil, Exiles, Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach, Stephen Hero, Giacomo Joyce, Critical Writings & more
“Of all human events, perhaps, the publication of a first volume of verses is the most insignificant; but though a matter of no moment to the world, it is still of some concern to the author.”
Source: Published Poems: The Writings of Herman Melville
“Charity, like poetry, should be cultivated, if only for its being graceful.”
Source: The Confidence-Man
“Poetry is a finikin thing of air
That lives uncertainly and not for long
Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.”
Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
“You know that the nucleus of a time is not
The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind
Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed
As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins
Nor stand there making orotund consolations.
He shares the confusions of intelligence.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“It is never the thing but the version of the thing:
The fragrance of the woman not her self,
Her self in her manner not the solid block,
The day in its color not perpending time,
Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord,
The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“In the great cities, winter glitters with art and feasting. But poetry, the country cousin, sees only the dearth of the fields.”
“Abyss-mongering makes professors and poets feel daring.”
“Title deeds generally outlast poems.”
“When poets go off the boil, they sound like bumble bees; when critics do, they sound like sewing machines.”
“Rhyme and meter force gaps in meaning so the muse can enter.”
“Let my muse
Fail of thy former helps, and only use
Her inadulterate strength. What's done by me
Hereafter shall smell of the lamp, not thee.”
“In sober mornings do not thou rehearse
The holy incantation of a verse”
Source: Hesperides; or, Works both human and divine
“I have since written what no tide
Shall ever wash away, what men
Unborn shall read o'er ocean wide
And find Ianthe's name agen.”
Source: Heroic idyls, with additional poems
“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.”
Source: A New England girlhood
“Can you remember? when we thought
the poets taught how to live?”
Source: Your Native Land, Your Life
“... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.”
Source: On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978
“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)
“... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”
Source: What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)
“Iambics march from short to long;--
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapaests throng”
Source: Selected Poetry
“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.”
Source: Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge: In Two Volumes
“The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E.E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off andon for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry lovers.”
“This life is a war we are not yet
winning for our daughters' children.
Don't do your enemies' work for them.
Finish your own.”
Source: Moon Is Always Female
“I have no connections here; only gusty collisions,
rootless seedlings forced into bloom, that collapse.
...
I am the Visiting Poet: a real unicorn,
a wind-up plush dodo, a wax museum of the Movement.
People want to push the buttons and see me glow.”
“As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.”
Source: Thoughts, Letters & Minor Works
“How poetry comes to the poet is a mystery.”
“Freedom is slavery some poets tell us.
Enslave yourself to the right leader's truth,
Christ's or Karl Marx', and it will set you free.”
Source: The poetry of Robert Frost
“Summary riposte
To the dreary wail
There's no knowing what
Love is all about.
Poets know a lot.”
Source: The poetry of Robert Frost
“How wide is all this long pretense!
There is in love a sweetness ready penned,
Copy out only that, and save expense.”
Source: The English poems of George Herbert, together with his collection of proverbs entitled Jacula prudentum
“As flames do work and wind when they ascend,
So did I weave myself into the sense.”
Source: The poetical works of George Herbert
“I envy no man's nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme,
Who plainly say, My God, My King.”
Source: The poetical works of George Herbert
“The poet is he who fights on the passionate
Side and whoever loses he wins; when he
Is defeated it is hard to say who wins.”
Source: Collected Poems, 1919-1976
“Now that I have written many words,
and let out so many loves, for so many,
and been altogether what I always was
a woman of excess, of zeal and greed,
I find the effort useless.”
“I am not lazy.
I am on the amphetamine of the soul.
I am, each day,
typing out the God
my typewriter believes in.”
Source: Selected Poems of Anne Sexton
“I tell it stories now and then
and feed it images like honey.
I will not speculate today
with poems that think they're money.”
Source: Words for Dr. Y.: uncollected poems with three stories
“I was only sitting here in my white study
with the awful black words pushing me around.”
“With this pen I take in hand my selves
and with these dead disciples I will grapple.
Though rain curses the window
let the poem be made.”
“I said, the poets are there
I hear them singing and lying
around their round table
and around me still.”
“Poets are sitting in my kitchen.
Why do these poets lie?
Why do children get children and
Did you hear what it said?”
“My business is words. Words are like labels,
or coins, or better, like swarming bees.”
Source: Selected Poems of Anne Sexton
“You must be a poet,
a lady of evil luck
desiring to be what you are not,
longing to be
what you can only visit.”
Source: The Awful Rowing Toward God