Poet Quotes - Page 9

A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.

The starving poet business is no good nowadays.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

The violinist is that peculiarly human phenomenon distilled to a rare potency---half tiger,half poet.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

Even a polemic has some justification if one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement.

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

German poetry is going in a very different direction from French poetry.... Its language has become more sober, more factual. It distrusts "beauty." It tries to be truthful.

Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.

There is room neither for the poet nor for the contemplator in an egalitarian world.

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.

Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement.

Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.

The progress of any writer is marked by those moments when he manages to outwit his own inner police system.

When oxygen and sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence of a filiament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum.

The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

Poets don't finish poems, they abandon them.

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

When we did Cubist paintings, our intention was not to produce Cubist paintings but to express what was within us. No one laid down a course of action for us, and our friends the poets followed our endeavour attentively but they never dictated it to us.