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Poet Quotes

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Poet Quotes

“A poet's mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy.”

Reality Order Hours Fiction Poet Missions Fiction And Reality

Author:Isak Dinesen

“The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely.”

World Littles Reality Lasts Poetry Emotion Poet Focused Lovely Bitter Resorts Finding Peace

Book:Journey around my room: the autobiography of Louise Bogan : a mosaic

Source: Journey around my room: the autobiography of Louise Bogan : a mosaic

“All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination. Even the richest, most surprising and wild imagination is not as rich, wild and surprising as reality. The task of the poet is to pick singular threads from this dense, colorful fabric.”

Reality Imagination Common Rich Poet Picks Tasks Regard Agreement Surprising Thread Fabric Colorful Dense All The Best Primacy Wild Imagination

Author:Wislawa Szymborska

“One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a well-made verbal object that does honor to the language in which it is written. Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective. What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.”

Wells Doe Made Said Two Reality Language Common Written Objects Poet Perspective Reader Honor Demand Unique Significant Two Things Validity Poetry By Famous Poets Unique Perspective

Author:W. H. Auden

“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

“Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or up-rooting, which pulls the word from the language: the other of gravity, which makes it return. The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is also reading and recitation: participation. The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality.”

Source: The Bow and the Lyre: The Poem, The Poetic Revelation, Poetry and History

“To a large degree, we are still bound to the modern scientific spirit, that characterizes reality merely by its material and mechanic aspects, without including life, consciousness and the intimate communion with that which poets, musicians and artists bring us in their magnificent works.”

Stills Reality Spirit Artist Consciousness Modern Poet Materials Degrees Musician Aspect Environmental Bounds Including Intimate Magnificent Communion Mechanic Stewardship

Author:Leonardo Boff

“My mother actually left American in 1929 to be part of an alternative community of bohemians around her then father-in-law who was a well-known Greek poet. This group of people were living in this semi-Luddite reality and weaving their own clothes - proto-hippies in a way- -but around an artistic vision.”

People Way Wells Reality Law Mother Father Left Community Known Vision Groups Poet Clothes Artistic Alternatives Greek Well Known Hippie In-laws Weaving Artistic Vision Father In Law

Author:Anne Waldman

“I think that what I learned then, I didn't know I was learning. I just knew that I was very privileged to see somebody who was a writer, a great poet, and very smart-faced. Suddenly Pasolini becomes a director, so he has to invent cinema. It was like watching the invention of cinema. But I found out that Pasolini taught me a lot. It was, especially, the kind of respect that he had for reality. He had kind of epiphanies in his movies, like when a moment becomes full of grace, and it is like as if it was the most important moment in the life of a character.”

Thinking Kind Important Moments Character Reality Grace Poet Invention Epiphany Very Smart Great Poet

Author:Bernardo Bertolucci

“The poet resists the pressures of reality, including the pressures of violence, in making, in forming, the poem. The tension is in the resistance - the poem is an act of resistance.”

Reality Violence Poet Tension

Author:Lawrence Joseph

“I do like Canadian poetry. Christian Bök, Anne Carson, Carmine Starnino, and Don McKay are a few of the Canadian poets whose work has been important to me. But I'm not sure that I do see poetry as a world apart. Some of my metaphors are based in the fantastic, but I try to be true to life as I understand it. That understanding is affected by my Canadianness, my Americanness, my whiteness, my gender, my age, my education, my experience...everything about me affects my view of reality. But I try to wrestle against those partialities, not embrace them.”

World Trying Important Reality Age Christian Understanding Poet Embrace Metaphor Gender Being True Fantastic Not Sure True Life Partiality

Author:James Arthur

“The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.”

Ends Reality Imagination Poet Degrees Dignity Importance Personal Dignity

Book:The Life of Reason Or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Art, Volume VII, Book Four

Source: The Life of Reason Or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Art, Volume VII, Book Four