Quotes About Poets

The poets are wrong of course […] But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.

You can't blame the President for the state of the country, it's always the poets' fault. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don't have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold.

The problem with describing poets as legislators is that at that level of politics - politics as political invention - poets have no special skills and are not apt to.

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet, but always his encouragement and support ... The sailor and traveller, the anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist, spiritualist, mathematician, historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.

Revolution is a bitter thing, mixed with filth and blood, not as lovely or perfect as the poets think. It is eminently down to earth, involving many humble, tiresome tasks, not so romantic as the poets think... . So it is easy for all who have romantic dreams about revolution to become disillusioned on closer acquaintance, when a revolution is actually carried out.

That is a horrible thing in a way, but it is the one thing poets can bring back to experience, this intense focus on language, which activates words as a portal back into experience. It's a mysterious process that's very hard to articulate, because it's focused entirely on the material of language in a way, but in the interests not just of language itself whatever that would mean - that's the mistake, by the way, that so many so-called "experimental" poets make - but in service to human experience.

You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.

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.

Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.

All men owe honor to the poets - honor and awe; for they are dearest to the Muse who puts upon their lips the ways of life.

Poets, when they write of love, give themselves and everyone else away!

You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.

Of necessity, we made the discovery that it is easier to turn poets into business journalists than to turn bookkeepers into writers.

Everyone wants to be open and inclusive, but nobody wants to pay for it. It's the biggest roadblock to translating living writers, especially poets.

My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands.

I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

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

Poets are like proverbs: you can always find one to contradict another.

Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.

It is possible that Mount Olympus may have supplied the poets with the hint for saying that Jupiter obtained the kingdom of heaven, because Olympus is the common name both of the mountain and of heaven.

A lot of young poets today, from what I've heard and experienced, can't get their heads past George W. Bush, and I've heard so many poems about this democracy and this era of politics that I'm kind of bored by it

Man demands truth and fulfills this demand in moral intercourse with other men; this is the basis of all social life. One anticipates the unpleasant consequences of reciprocal lying. From this there arises the duty of truth. We permit epic poets to lie because we expect no detrimental consequences in this case. Thus the lie is permitted where it is considered something pleasant. Assuming that it does no harm, the lie is beautiful and charming.

Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.

In the end, time is the best ally of poets. It clarifies their works and makes them accessible to an ever widening circle of readers.

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination.

In the mind of all, fiction, in the logical sense, has been the coin of necessity;—in that of poets of amusement—in that of the priest and the lawyer of mischievous immorality in the shape of mischievous ambition,—and too often both priest and lawyer have framed or made in part this instrument.

I love those moments on stage, on screen and in life when you dispense with language, when you sort of transcend it in a way, and certainly the experience of falling in love, I think, defies words, which is why poets, painters, musicians, actors have tried to describe that feeling, writers have just tried to put words to that.

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 would hardly change the sorrowful words of the poets for their glad ones. Tears dampen the strings of the lyre, but they grow the tensor for it, and ring even the clearer and more ravishingly.

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one. There is, indeed, a certain low and moderate sort of poetry, that a man may well enough judge by certain rules of art; but the true, supreme, and divine poesy is equally above all rules and reason. And whoever discerns the beauty of it with the most assured and most steady sight sees no more than the quick reflection of a flash of lightning.

Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.

Sometimes the greatest love is not found in the dramatic scenes that poets and writers immortalize. Often, the greatest manifestations of love are the simple acts of kindness and caring we extend to those we meet along the path of life.

When I first collected these authorities, I was desirous that every quotation should be useful to some other end than the illustration of a word; I therefore extracted from philosophers principles of science; from historians remarkable facts; from chymists complete processes; from divines striking exhortations; and from poets beautiful descriptions.

Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius.

Virtue is as little to be acquired by learning as genius; nay, the idea is barren, and is only to be employed as an instrument, in the same way as genius in respect to art. It would be as foolish to expect that our moral and ethical systems would turn out virtuous, noble, and holy beings, as that our aesthetic systems would produce poets, painters, and musicians.

What I'm nostalgic for is the idea of an edge in New York. There used to be these fringes of the city where civilization sort of ended, and therefore young people could live cheaply, or open nightclubs or art galleries, or even squat. That fringe moved out to New Jersey and Brooklyn. The whole idea of the metropolis is the centralization of like-minded souls, and when the central real estate becomes too expensive, the dreamers, the young poets, and the artists will go elsewhere.

Mediocrity is not allowed to poets, either by the gods or men.

In Náhuatl, the language of the Aztec world, one key word for poet was 'tlamatine,' meaning 'the one who knows,' or 'he who knows something.' Poets were considered 'sages of the word,' who meditated on human enigmas and explored the beyond, the realm of the gods.

I've learned that my readings of others' work often has little connection to their intentions. This doesn't mean that my response is wrong, and it doesn't make the author's views less right. Poets, like their poems, are "hopeful monsters".

Wine has been with us since the beginning of civilization. It is the temperate, civilized, sacred, romantic mealtime beverage recommended in the Bible. Wine has been praised for centuries by statesmen, philosophers, poets, and scholars. Wine in moderation is an integral part of our culture, heritage and gracious way of life.

Lesbians are the poets of the humanity of women.

The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.

Poets can tell the truth as they see it. It’s the author’s story, the author’s voice.

I hope I can write toward my interests. But poets should be afraid of too fluidly responding to what they're interested in.