poet quotes
The poet's business is not to describe things to us, or to tell us about things, but to create in our minds the very things themselves.
No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there.
Not deep the Poet sees, but wide.
Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood. One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
Encased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known; They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone.
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.
No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they werethe onlyone alive, and quite a number fondly believe that their wish has been granted.
To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.
Le Poe' te est semblable au prince des nue es Qui hante la tempe" te et se rit de l'archer; Exile sur le sol au milieu des hue es, Ses ailes de ge ant l'empe" chent de marcher. The Poet is like that prince of the clouds Who haunts the storms and laughs at the archer; Exiled to the ground in the midst of jeers, Hisgiant wings prevent him from walking.
Il n'existe que trois e" tres respectables: le pre" tre, le guerrier, le poe' te. Savoir, tuer et cre er. There are only three respectable beings: priest, warrior, poet. To know, to kill and to create.
The poet lives as long as his lines are imprinted on the minds of his readers.
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue Who says my hand a needle better fits, A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong For such despite they cast on female wits; If what I do prove well, it won't advance, They'll say it's stolen, or else, it was by chance.
And because I was a poet, and because the public praised me, With their critical deductions for the modern writer's fault; I could sit at rich men's tables,though the courtesies that raise me, Still suggested clear between us, the pale spectrum of the salt.
God is the perfect poet, Who in his person acts his own creations.
Stand still, true poet that you are! I know you; let me try and draw you. Some night you'll fail us: when afar You rise, remember one man saw you, Knew you, and named a star!
If ever I should condescend to prose, I'll write poetical commandments, which Shall supersede beyond all doubt all those That went before; in these I shall enrich My text with many things that no one knows, And carry precept to the highest pitch: I'll call the work 'Longinus o'er a Bottle, Or, Every Poet his own Aristotle'.
Why do you rush through the fields in trains, Guessing so much and so much. Why do you flash through the flowery meads, Fat-head poet that nobody reads; And why do you know such a frightful lot About people in gloves and such? See Cornford 237:69.
You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough.
You explain nothing,O poet, but thanks to you all things become explicable.
Le pire drame pour un poe' te, c'est d'e" tre admire par malentendu. The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind.
The poet reminds men of their uniqueness and it is not necessary to possess the ultimate definition of this uniqueness. Even to speculate is a gain.
Spare the poet for his subject's sake.
If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very littlesomebody who is obsessed by Making.
The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.
Tempt me no more; for I Have known the lightning's hour, The poet's inward pride, The certainty of power.
Neat Marlowe, bathed in theThespian springs, Had in him those brave translunary things That the first poets had; his raptures were All air and fire, which made his verses clear, For that fine madness still he did retain Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.
If I would compare [Jonson] with Shakespeare, I must acknowledge him the more correct poet, but Shakespeare the greater wit.
Sure the poetspewed up a good lump of clotted nonsense at once.
The bad poet dwells partly in a world of objects and partly in a world of words, and he never can get them to fit.
When a poet's mind isperfectlyequipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiencein the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.
But the essential advantage for a poetis to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.
Le poe' te est celui qui inspire bien plus que celui qui est inspire . The poet is more the inspirer than the one who is inspired.
the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.
O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, Student of our sweet English tongue, Read out my words at night, alone: I was a poet, I was young.
A poet is a person who thinks there is something special about a poet and about his loving one unattainable woman.You'll usually find he takes the physical out on whores. I am defining a romantic poetand there is no other kind. An unromantic poet is a self-contradiction.
In the house of words was a table of colors. They offered themselves in great fountains and each poet took the color he needed: lemon yellow or sun yellow, ocean blue or smoke blue, crimson red, blood red, wine red.
Are these the choice dishes the Doctor has sent us? Is this the great poet whose works so content us? This Goldsmith's fine feast, who has written fine books? Heaven sends us fine meat, but the Devil sends cooks.
Poetryisnotanexpressionofthepartyline.It'sthattimeof night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
Nous savons tous ici que le droit est la plus puissante des e coles de l'imagination. Jamais poe' te n'a interpre te la nature aussi librement qu'un juriste la re alite . We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freelyas a lawyer interprets the truth.
Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as soon as he reflects he is a child.
Stirring suddenly from long hibernation, I knew myself once more a poet Guarded by timeless principalities Against the worm of death.
To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.
The poet is the unsatisfied child who dares to ask the difficult question which arises from the schoolmaster's answer to his simple question, and then the still more difficult question which arises from that.
I paid the prices of life Standing where Rome immortal heard October's strife, A war poet whose right of honour cuts falsehood like a knife. 375
What is a modern poet's fate? To write his thoughts upon a slate; The critic spits on what is done, Gives it a wipeand all isgone.
Vixere fortes anteAgamemnona Multi; sed omnes illacrimabiles Urgentur ignotique longa Nocte, carent quia vate sacro. Many brave men lived before Agamemnon's time; but theyare all unmourned and unknown, covered by the long night, because they lack their sacred poet.
Thisgreat College, of this ancient University, has seen some strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk and Porson sober. And here am I, a better poet than Porson, and a better scholar than Wordsworth, betwixt and between.
O Virgile! o" poe' te! o" mon ma|"tre divin! OhVirgil! Oh poet! Oh my divine master!
A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.
The poet as well Builds his monument mockingly; For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun Die blind, his heart blackening: Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found The honey peace in old poems.
But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer.
LawnTennyson, gentleman poet.
And they shall be accounted poet kings Who simply tell the most heart-easing things.
The poet and the dreamer are distinct, Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes. The one pours out a balm upon the world, The other vexes it.
Although Brooke never succeeded in becoming the first modern poet, he may deserve to be called the first modern undergraduate, a title of comparable significance.
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
The poet knowshimselfonlyonthe conditionthatthings resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, theyand he come forth together out of sleep.
I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants. SeeAuden 40:2.
La vie d'un poe' te est celle de tous. The life of the poet is the life of everyone.
All the poet can do today is to warn. That is why the true Poet must be truthful.
It is the responsibility of society to let the poet be a poet It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman.
It is the responsibility of the poet to be lazy to hang out and prophesy.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig- tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poetI saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
The true poet is most easily distinguished from the false when he trusts himself to the simplest expression and writes without adjectives.
It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.
The poet is a master of the quotidian, of conveying a whole history in two or three lines that point to an exact past drama and intensifya future one.
Le poe' te est vraiment voleur de feu. The poet is the true fire-stealer.
A poet's work To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.
In the spacious highways of books major or minor, each poet is allowed the stride that will get him where he wants to go if,God help him, he can hit that stride and keep it.
The poet must be free to love or hate as the spirit moves him, freeto change, freeto be a chameleon, freetobe an enfant terrible. He must above all never worry about his effect on other people.Power requires that one do just that all the time. Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked.No, we poetshavetogo naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people; a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what?
When you're a poet, you're a poet first.When it comes, it's like an angel. 715
A manmay be borna poet, but hehastomakehimself an artist as well.
The Harper smiled, well pleased; for ne'er Was flattery lost on poet's ear: A simple race! they waste their toil For the vain tribute of a smile.
Call it not vain:they do not err Who say, that when the Poet dies, Mute Nature mourns her worshipper, And celebrates his obsequies.
Like a Poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.
Better than all measures Of delightful sound, Better than all treasures That in books are found, Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!
Chameleons feed on light and air: Poet's food is love and game.
On a poet's lips I slept Dreaming like a love-adept In the sound his breathing kept.
The vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language to another the creations of a poet. 786 The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower.
The poet shares with other artists the faculty of seeing things as though for the first time.
Where is the antique glory now become, What whilom wont in women to appear? Where be the brave achievements doen by some? Where be the battles, where the shield and spear, And all the conquests, which them high did rear, That matter made for famous poet's verse, And boastful men so oft abashed to hear? Bene theyall dead, and laid in doleful hearse? Or doen they only sleep, and shall again reverse?
The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.
The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.
So, naturalists observe, a flea Hath smaller fleas on him prey; And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum. Thus every poet, in his kind, Is bit by him that comes behind.
There was a poor poet named Clough, Whom his friends all united to puff, But the public, though dull, Had not such a skull As belonged to believers in Clough.
This is truth the poet sings, That a sorrow's crownofsorrow isremembering happier things.
The passionate heart of the poet is whirled into folly and vice.
For the first twenty years you are still growing, Bodily that is; as a poet, of course, You are not born yet. It's the next ten You cut your teeth on to emerge smirking For your brash courtship of the muse.
We are beginning to see now it is matter is the scaffolding of spirit; that the poet emerges from morphemes and phonemes; that as form in sculpture is the prisoner of the hard rock, so in everyday life it is the plain facts and natural happenings that conceal God and reveal him to us little by little under the mind's tooling.
There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.
I have decided to be a poet. My father said there isn't a suitable career structure for poets and no pensions and other boring things, but I am quite decided.
The poetmay be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
Every poet knows the pun is Pierian, that it springs from the same soil as the Musea matching and shifting of vowels and consonants, an adroit assonance sometimes derided as jackassonance.
Un poe' te C'est un e" tre unique ' A des tas d'exemplaires Qui ne pense qu'en vers Et n'e crit qu'en musique Sur des sujets divers Des rouges ou des verts Mais toujours magnifiques. A poet Is a unique being From an exemplary multitude Who only thinks in verse And only writes in music On diverse subjects Reds and greens But always magnificently. 880
A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.
The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazedand gazedbut little thought What wealth the show to me had brought.
If mine had been the painter's hand, To express what then I saw; and add the gleam, The light that never was, on sea or land, The consecration, and the poet's dream.
Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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