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Poets Quotes

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Poets Quotes

“Oh, oh!' said Renzo, 'you are a poet!' To comprehend this witticism of poor Renzo, it is necessary to be informed, that in the eyes of the vulgar of Milan, and more particularly in its environs, the name of poet did not signify, as among cultivated people, a sublime genius, an inhabitant of Pindus, a pupil of the muses, but a whimsicality and eccentricity in discourse and conduct, which had more of singularity than sense; and an absurd wresting of words from their legitimate signification.”

PoetsAbstruseness
Book:The Betrothed
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“Writing is a form of painting with words. Artists of every genre seek to convey every aspect of being, but some internal scenery proves impossible to recreate with word pictures. Writers and poets, past and present, seem to be obsessed with what it means to die, and perpetually haunted by actively imagining how to destroy their own being. Perchance this morbid fascination with eternal silence is because death is the one event that remains outside their ability ever accurately to paint with words.”

DeathPoetsWriters On WritingSelf DestructionWriting PhilosophyWriters On ThinkingEgo DeathDeath And Dying Quotes
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Now, who and what is this minstrel in reality? Where does he come from? In what respects does he differ from his predecessors? He has been described as a cross between the early medieval court-singer and the ancient mime of classical times. The mime had never ceased to flourish since the days of classical antiquity; when even the last traces of classical culture disappeared, the descendants of the old mimes still continued to travel about the Empire, entertaining the masses with their unpretentious, unsophisticated and unliterary art. The Germanic countries were flooded out with mimes in the early Middle Ages; but until the ninth century the poets and singers at the courts kept themselves strictly apart from them. Not until they lost their cultured audience, as a result of the Carolingian Renaissance and the clericalism of the following generation, and came up against the competition of the mimes in the lower classes, did they have, to a certain extent, to become mimes themselves in order to be able to compete with their rivals. Thus both singers and comedians now move in the same circles, intermingle and influence each other so much that they soon become indistinguishable from one another. The mime and the scop both become the minstrel. The most striking characteristic of the minstrel is his versatility. The place of the cultured, highly specialized heroic ballad poet is now taken by the Jack of all trades, who is no longer merely a poet and singer, but also a musician and dancer, dramatist and actor, clown and acrobat, juggler and bear-leader, in a word, the universal jester and maître de plaisir of the age. Specialization, distinction and solemn dignity are now finished with; the court poet has become everybody’s fool and his social degradation has such a revolutionary and shattering effect on himself that he never entirely recovers from the shock. From now on he is one of the déclassés, in the same class as tramps and prostitutes, runaway clerics and sent-down students, charlatans and beggars. He has been called the ‘journalist of the age’, but he really goes in for entertainment of every kind: the dancing song as well as the satirical song, the fairy story as well as the mime, the legend of saints as well as the heroic epic. In this context, however, the epic takes on quite new features: it acquires in places a more pointed character with a new straining after effect, which was absolutely foreign to the spirit of the old heroic ballad. The minstrel no longer strikes the gloomy, solemn, tragi-heroic note of the ‘Hildebrandslied’, for he wants to make even the epic sound entertaining; he tries to provide sensations, effective climaxes and lively epigrams. Compared with the monuments of the older heroic poetry, the ‘Chanson de Roland’ never fails to reveal this popular minstrel taste for the piquant.”

PoetsMinstrelCourt PoetCarnivalesquePopular Poets
Book:The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages
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“All people must advance through the same physical stages of life and deal with the similar environmental challenges, societal obligations, and family duties. Is it common for the incessant demands of survival completely to inundate the vast majority of people, if not utterly incapacitate them? Do the external conundrums of birth, taxes, illness, and death preoccupy most people? If so, will only select people seek clarity? Do most people fill their lives to the brim with the stupendous task of making a living, taking care of household matters, and chasing recreation? If most people expend all their energy reserves in mundane subsistence activities, how is it that select people of every era create magnificent works of art, literature, and music that uplift all of humanity?”

ArtLiteratureMusicMusicianWritersPoetsArtistsCreative PeopleArtistic LifeCreative Impulse
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“When there is fear,I will have my pen hold high,when the wonders of night give its light, I lie behind the familiar world with a strange crown, not of Lilly,nor of violets,not of hawthorn,not of maple,but burthen words my fallen tears build an avenger’s crown.”

PoetryWritersPoetsAuthor QuotesStory BookThe Bell Ringing WomanBook GalleryFiction BookPoet SupportJourney Mystery
Book:The Bell Ringing Woman: A Blue Bell of Inspiration
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“O' sprite full Maia, come attire our lands with your boundless prize,of joyful swelling by the nature's pleasing bloom and green surprise; to sprout a floral bedding round the yards and shades for worthy dales;and birds will spin their adorned bowers over the dewy boughs and vales.”

PoetryPoetsNature QuotesNithin PurpleNithin Purple QuotesPoesyBirds QuotesMaiaHalcyon WingsDales Quotes
Book:Halcyon Wings: 'These passions feathers are gathering on a winged vision'
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“We do not like final knowledge, because knowledge, Phaedo, has no dignity or severity: it knows, understands, forgives, without attitude; it is sympathetic to the abyss, it is the abyss. Therefore we deny it and instead seek beauty, simplicity, greatness and severity, of objectivity and form. But form and objectivity, Phaedo, lead the noble one to intoxication and desire, to horrible emotional transgressions rejected by his beautiful severity, lead to the abyss. Us poets, I say, it leads there, for we are unable to elevate ourselves, instead we can only transgress.”

BeautyKnowledgePoets
Book:Death in Venice
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“Tis not the greatest singer Who tries the loftiest themes, He is the true joy bringer, Who tells his simplest dreams. He is the greatest poet, Who will renounce all art, And take his heart and show it To every other heart; Who writes no learned riddle, But sings his simplest rune, Takes his heart strings for a fiddle, And plays his easiest tune ~ Sam Walter Foss (1858-1911) [From Back Country Poems, 1892]”

PoetryPoets
Book:Back Country Poems
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“The man was high yellow In public, afraid of himself, pretending his music Was material when in fact, it was the opposite: Like a breath that comes so quickly you know You’re breathing ether: either atmospheric And anonymous as the air against a window, Or indefinite & mute as a curtain of wind.”

WritingPoetryPoemsPoetsAfrican AmericansBlacksLangston Hughes
Book:American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
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“I have a romanticised idea about dedicating myself to my work, to live and die for it and let nothing else interrupt. To live and learn all there is to live and learn in order to be a great writer, a great artist: all I came here to be.”

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Book:He loved me some days. I'm sure he did: 99 essays on growth through loss
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“Many more looked around at happy and unhappy things alike, left the room, and agreed to the pen. It’s a weird occasion, writing is. It appears as peaceful, silent years of nothing, but implies the valor of someone fighting a lifelong monster. To decide to wield the pen is a win with no victory. But some lines of theirs were more important than satisfaction. What is a bookshelf but a place for us to see all the nights our dearest of friends did not see their own?”

WritingArtPoetryReadingCreativityBooksWritersPoetsWriters On WritingThe Goodbye Song
Book:The Goodbye Song
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