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Poet Quotes

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Poet Quotes

“I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.”

Sound Quality Wonder Poet Chinese

Author:Tom Verlaine

“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.”

May Persons Book Character Reading Pleasure Quality Poet Flower Fool Delight Stupidity Silly Sincere Masterpiece Cleverness Freshness Sincere Love Picking Flowers Silly Person

Author:Gilbert K. Chesterton

“Genius, that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgment is cold, and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies and animates.”

Energy Quality Poet Cold Genius Judgment Amplify

Book:Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets

Source: Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets

“Nobody is publicly accepted as an expert on poetry unless he displays the sign of poet, mathematician, etc., but universal men want no sign and make hardly any distinction between the crafts of poet and embroiderer. Universal men are not called poets or mathematicians, etc. But they are all these things and judges of them too. No one could guess what they are, and they will talk about whatever was being talked about when they came in. One quality is not more noticeable in them than another, unless it becomes necessary to put it into practice, and then we remember it.”

Men Want Remember Quality Practice Poet Judging Universal Accepted Crafts Experts Distinction Etc Display Mathematician

Author:Blaise Pascal

“Our emotions are ever-changing and infinitely varied, but the words with which we describe them are fixed and rigid. Our life is like quicksilver, our vocabulary like steel. Sometimes a consummate poet succeeds in rendering the quality of life in words. For the rest of us, this is not possible.”

Sometimes Life Is Emotion Quality Our Lives Poet Succeed Fixed Steel Vocabulary Quality Of Life Life Is Like Rendering

Author:Laura Huxley

“You are not an artist simply because you paint or sculpt or make pots that cannot be used. An artist is a poet in his or her own medium. And when an artist produces a good piece, that work has mystery, an unsaid quality; it is alive.”

Used Artist Quality Pieces Alive Mystery Produce Poet Paint Mediums Pot Unsaid

Book:The poetry of clay: the art of Toshiko Takaezu

Source: The poetry of clay: the art of Toshiko Takaezu

“Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because, probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.”

Needs Humans Wells Might Spirit Quality Poet Highest Ideals Stranger Poetic Mates Intercourse Similarity Dreary Elevation Endowment Craftsman

Book:The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Essays, Letters and Memoirs (Illustrated): The Scarlet Letter with its Adaptation, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, Tanglewood Tales, Birthmark, Ghost of Doctor Harris… (Including Biographies and Literary Criticism)

Source: The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Essays, Letters and Memoirs (Illustrated): The Scarlet Letter with its Adaptation, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, Tanglewood Tales, Birthmark, Ghost of Doctor Harris… (Including Biographies and Literary Criticism)

“... the attempt to control poetry, to subordinate it to extrapoetic ends, constitutes misuse.... it may be poetry's stubborn quality of rockbottom, intrinsic uselessness whichconstitutes the guarantee of its integrity, and hence of its ultimate value to us.”

May Ends Poetry Values Quality Feminism Poet Integrity Ultimate Guarantees Stubborn Subordinates Misuse Uselessness

Author:Jan Clausen

“Poets have the gift to speak for others, Vasko Popa had the very rare quality of hearing the others.”

Speak Quality Poet Hearing

Author:Octavio Paz

“This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost everybody is a poet, but scarcely anyone can write a poem.”

Writing Said Important Age Quality Poet

Author:Clive James

“The government of the United States, under Lyndon Johnson, proposes to concern itself over the quality of American life. And this is something very new in the political theory of free nations. The quality of life has heretofore depended on the quality of the human beings who gave tone to that life, and they were its priests and its poets, not its bureaucrats.”

“Cats are to dogs what modern people are to the people we used to have. Cats are slimmer, cleaner, more attractive, disloyal, and lazy. It's easy to understand why the cat has eclipsed the dog as modern America's favorite poet. People like poets to possess the same qualities they do.”

People America Used Easy Quality Modern Dog Poet Cat Attractive Lazy Cleaners Disloyal Modern America

Author:P. J. O'Rourke

“The manager-leader of the future should combine in one personality the robust, realistic quality of the man of action with the insight of the artist, the religious leader, the poet, who explains man to himself. The man of action alone or the man of contemplation alone will not be enough; these two qualities together are required.”

Men Should Two Enough Action Together Artist Religious Quality Leader He Man Poet Personality Insight Managers Contemplation Realistic Robust Religious Leaders

Author:David Lilienthal

“The photo-journalist and the photo-poet are both important. The problem is to separate the major objectives of the various groups and not to attribute qualities and intentions where they do not belong.”

Important Problem Quality Groups Poet Majors Intention Various Objectives Journalist Attributes

Author:Ansel Adams

“If you look at the recent Nobel Prize winners, one couldn't say that the work didn't matter and the political commitment did. Who had ever heard of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz? He is not politically involved. Octavio Paz is a great poet, also not politically involved. The Nobel Prize is for literature, for the quality of work over the years.”

Ifs Years Looks Matter Political Literature Quality Heard Poet Involved Commitment Winner Prize Nobel Nobel Prize Egyptian Great Poet Quality Work Nobel Prize Winners

Author:Nadine Gordimer

“The events in America now have the quality of things you would find out about long after the fact, and think: if only we had known. Well, we do know now. But what are we doing? Maybe a poet like Lowell brought America a little nearer to its boiling point.”

Thinking Long Quality Poet

Author:Dan Chiasson

“I love to publish new writers, and we do so consistently. But a lot of contemporary American poets sound alike to me. They want to bring spoken, prosy language into poetry and I understand that desire. But they don't edit. It's not very curated work. It seems very lackluster, very uncareful. It may be the un-carefulness is also something they intend but there's a kind of "So what?" quality to a lot of it.”

Kind Desire Language Quality Poet Consistently Publish

Author:Jonathan W. Galassi

“It is hard to compare cultures without overgeneralizing, but I think a lot of American poetry has an assertiveness - an upbeat quality - that's less typical of Canadian poetry. Of course there are poets in both countries to whom that generalization does not apply. Speaking broadly, I'd describe Canadians as being a bit more reserved than Americans. Not less opinionated - just less direct.”

Thinking Country Culture Quality Poet Direct Compare Assertiveness Upbeat

Author:James Arthur

“The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists.”

Artist Culture Literature Individual Term Wealth Quality Military Poet Materials Civilization Achievement Philosopher Prosperity Representatives Military Power Material Wealth

Book:Selected writings: poetry and criticism

Source: Selected writings: poetry and criticism