Poet Quotes - Page 25

The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.

He consorted with prostitutes and poets...and with persons even worse.

Poetry lies at the centre of the literary experience because it is the form that most clearly asserts the specificity of literature.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

I still love poetic imagery. I love the idea of using surrealist speak to generate lyrical content and I love the way English can be exciting in and of itself.

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.

Painters and poets alike have always had license to dare anything! We know that, and we both claim and allow to others in their turn this indulgence.

Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being, and the expansion of a single being, even to God

No one can threaten poetry. It's always been there, always will be. Humans need it to live: it has sustaining powers. How could we (anyone) get through adolescence without some form of song? Song is only a version of lyric poetry that is carried more by melody than by internal coherence and unity. but lyric and song - they are the same.

I love poetry and my country above all else in the world.

A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We're involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We're always going to need it.

You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It’s only that.

In the Augustan age ... poetry was ... the sister of architecture; with the romantics, and their heightened vowel-sense, resulting in different melodic lines, she became the sister of music; in the present day, she appears like the sister of horticulture, each poem growing according to the law of its own nature.

Sweetheart, when you break thru you'll find a poet here, not quite what one would choose.

Prophetic utterance, like poetic utterance, transforms experience and moves the receiver to new attitudes. The kinds of experience--the recognitions or revelations--out of which both prophecy and poetry emerge, are such as to stir the prophet or poet to speech that may exceed their own known capacities; they are "inspired," they breathe in revelation and breathe out new words; and by so doing they transfer over to the listener or reader a parallel experience, a parallel intensity, which impels that person into new attitudes and new actions.

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.

A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.

Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.

This act [creation], as it is for God, must always remain totally inconceivable to man. For we--even our poets and musicians and inventors--never, in the ultimate sense make. We only build. We always have materials to build from. All we can know about the act of creation must be derived from what we can gather about the relation of the creatures to their Creator

Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.