Poet Quotes - Page 31

Poetry is when you talk to yourself.

The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's

Call it not vain: they do not err Who say that when the poet dies Mute Nature mourns her worshipper, And celebrates his obsequies.

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.

Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.

The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.

Stopgaps do belong to the internal economy of the form, since the Whole requires them, even if only in a subordinate position ... The stopgap Luigi Paryson's 'zeppa' accepts its own banality, because without the speed that the banal allows up, it would slow up a passage that is crucial for the outcome of the work and its interpretation.

What we know for sure is that metaphor is the raw uranium of poetry, and that an urge to say that one thing is like something else is one of the earliest markers of the poetic spirit, the nascent poet.

They say poets write mostly for themselves; if anyone else likes it, well and good, if not, it doesn't matter; certainly, not to me.

The Irish believed that gods, druids, poets, and others in touch with the magical world could be literal shape-shifters

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

The word poet literally means maker: anything which is not well made doesn't exist.

The engineers of the future will be poets.

What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.

If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices.

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense; it has particular ways of catching an environment.

If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.

The definition of good prose is proper words in their proper places; of good verse, the most proper words in their proper places.The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.

Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.

The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.