Quotes About Poets

Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?

Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.

Sure there are poets which did never dream Upon Parnassus, nor did taste the stream Of Helicon; we therefore may suppose Those made not poets, but the poets those.

That is many poets don't know how to tell a story and they don't have a sense of how to put things in order to tell a story and we thought the poets could learn from fiction writers something about developing a character over time who wasn't just you and also creating a narrative structure.

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

It will be hard James but you come from sturdy peasant stock men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity You come from a long line of great poets some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said "The very time I thought I was lost My dungeon shook and my chains fell off." You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you James and Godspeed.

New arts are long in the world before poets describe them; for they borrow everything from their predecessors, and commonly derive very little from nature or from life.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood... How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.

Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to do ... is to write as little as possible

Everyone is a poet at 16, but how many are poets at 50? Generally, people seem to get more conservative as they age, but in my case, I seem to have gotten more radical.

I think I've always felt very isolated, and I'm sure lots of poets do.

Ireland is a land of poets and legends, of dreamers and rebels. All of these have music woven through and around them. Tunes for dancing or for weeping, for battle or for love.

If any of you are secret poets, the best way to break into print is to run for the presidency.

Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

If you're just starting off as an artist, steal as much inspiration from everything you like, as much as you can. Take from books, from poets, from musicians. Just steal stuff from all over the place and then mix it up to make something of your own.

I hear poets complaining: 'We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that.'

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

Poets use metaphors and symbolism to construct images. I construct my images in the same way, except that I am using a different form.

Color is the language of the poets. It is astonishingly lovely. To speak it is a privilege.

OUT-OF-DOORS, n. That part of one's environment upon which no government has been able to collect taxes. Chiefly useful to inspire poets.

But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

My sisters were going out with artists and poets, and eventually it was the creative world which attracted me.

Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

The Rising was mainly a piece of streat theatre designed by poets for dramatic effect. For better or worse, it became part of the founding myth which states need - but which they should move on from after a time. Major John MacBride, in a cameo performance in which he left Jacobs Mill, as he had entered it, immaculately dressed down to the white spats, told his colleagues Next time lads, don't shut yourself up behind four walls. It was good advice.

You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.

When the old poets made some virtue their theme, they were not teaching but adoring.

You can recollect the sayings of great men, you treasure up verse of renowned poets; ought you not be equally profound in your knowledge of the words of God, so that you may be able to quote them readily when you would solve a difficulty or overthrow a doubt?

I once gave a workshop and I asked the women poets there, If you went back to that little town you've come from - these were from small towns - would you say, I'm a poet? And one of them said, If I said I was a poet in that town, they'd think I didn't wash my windows. And that stayed with me for so long, the sense of the collective responsibility of someone as against the individual thing it takes to be a poet.

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life. Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars. And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things?

Those things which make the infernal regions terrible, the darkness, the prison, the river of flaming fire, the judgment seat, are all a fable, with which the poets amuse themselves, and by them agitate us with vain terrors.

Poets and songwriters speak highly of spring as one of the great joys of life in the temperate zone, but in the real world most of spring is disappointing. We looked forward to it too long, and the spring we had in mind in February was warmer and dryer than the actual spring when it finally arrives. We'd expected it to be a whole season, like winter, instead of a handful of separate moments and single afternoons.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

There are poets who believe that you shouldn't engage at all in any cause. And there's something to be said for that. Because you don't want to - I think most political poetry is very bad. And it's very bad because you know too much to start with. You have a sense that you're right, and you're trying to tell other people what's right. And I think that's always kind of fundamentalism, and I don't like it.

The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.

CEMETERY, n. An isolated suburban spot where mourners match lies, poets write at a target and stone-cutters spell for a wager.

An emperor knows how to govern when poets are free to make verses, people to act plays, historians to tell the truth, ministers to give advice, the poor to grumble at taxes, students to learn lessons aloud, workmen to praise their skill and seek work, people to speak of anything, and old men to find fault with everything.

I look at the great poets of the Soviet Union, like Anna Akhmatova, who endured far worse then anything we've seen or hopefully that we will ever see. If they could keep writing and keep a voice alive, keep people hopeful through their poetry, then I would be ashamed to stop and to give in. It would be really self-indulgent, unacceptable, and inexcusable to walk away from it.

The ancient Greeks, poets, authors and philosophers all puzzled over the question but nobody really knows what love is - including me. Longing for another person is an exciting mental experience.

Poets find truth by writing about what they love.

I think that the dark side of MFA programs is that they're generating more poets than the culture can absorb and there are more people writing poetry than possibly read it or can certainly earn a living around it.