Artists and poets are the raw nerve ends of humanity. By themselves they can do little to save humanity.Without them there would be little worth saving.
Artistes, poe' tes, e crivains, si vous copiez toujours, on ne vous copiera jamais. Artists, poets, writers, if you copy others all the time, no one will copy you.
All poets are mad.
Love is a boy, by poets styled, Then spare the rod, and spoil the child.
Poets paint with words, painters speak with works.
To know how to say what others only know how tothink is what makes men poets or sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformersor both.
Poets do not go mad; but chess players do.
There is a pleasure in poetic pains Which only poets know.
The poets of each generation seldom sing a new song. They turn themes men always have loved, and sing them in the mode of their times.
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.
He invades authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in other poets, is only victory in him.
Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets;Jonson was theVirgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I love Shakespeare.
The very Janus of poets; he wears almost everywhere twofaces; and you havescarcebeguntoadmirethe one, ere you despise the other.
Three poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. The first in loftiness of thought surpassed, The next in majesty, in both the last: The force of Nature could no farther go; To make a third, she joined the former two.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as isnatural, was dueto the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.
Like dancers on the ropes poor poets fare, Most perish young, the rest in danger are.
We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, We Poets of the proud old lineage Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest.
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.
The poets get a quizzical ahem. They reflect time, I am the very ticking.
and poets should stay out of politics or become monsters I have become monsterous with politics.
Neuere Poeten tun viel Wasser in dieTinte. Modern poets mix a lot of water with their ink.
Poetsshould never marry.Theworld should thank mefor not marrying you.
Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism, or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.
The poets of commerce.
The best subjects for artists, surely, are animals and plants, grasses and trees; these they can represent, but human beings they ought to leave to poets.
Is there no way to beget In my limbs their former heat? Aeson had (as Poets fain) Baths that made him young again: Find that Medicine (if you can) For your dry-decrepit man: Who would but fain his strength renew, Were it but to pleasure you.
Fortunately forpoetsandthosewho liketowalk about in the open air, the beauty of landscape is not something that can be reduced easily to basic geology or a few ready-wrapped phrases about what places are used for. Preference and prejudice creep in.
I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.
It is well to start by distinguishing the few really greatthemajornovelistswho count inthesamewayas the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.
Poetsare literal-minded menwho will squeeze a word till it hurts.
What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then? If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters'thoughts, And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, Their minds, and muses on admire' d themes; If all the heavenly quintessence they still From their immortal flowers of poesy, Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive The highest reaches of a human wit; If these had made one poem's period, And all combined in beauty's worthiness, Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, Which into words no virtue can digest.
Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream.
Surely, it is in youth man is most thoroughly depraved. Hell lies about us in our infancy. The youthful innocency sung by aged poets (who forget their first childhood) is nothing but ignorance of evil. As the child comes to know evil, he loves it.
Poetry happens because of life.Poetry happens because of language.And poetryhappensbecauseofotherpoets.
Where do you get your taste in authorsThat damned library of yours! (He indicates the small bookcase at rear.) Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen! Atheists, fools, and madmen! And your poets! This Dowson, and this Baudelaire, and Swinburne and O'Neill Oscar Wilde, and Whitman and Poe! Whoremongers and degenerates! Pah! When I've three good sets of Shakespeare there (he nods at the large bookcase) you could read.
Poets! Madness is a gift god-given (though not to me).
Poets like painters, thus unskilled to trace The naked nature and the living grace, With gold and jewels cover ev'ry part, And hide with ornaments their want of art. True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.
While pensive poets painful vigils keep, Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep.
Great poetsseldommake bricks without straw.They pile up allthe excellencestheycanbeg, borrow, or steal from their predecessors and contemporaries and then set their own inimitable light atop the mountain.
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak, Or English poets who grew up on Greek (I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futuritycastsuponthepresent; thewordswhichexpress what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
The puff collusive is the newest of any; for it acts in the disguise of determined hostility. It is much used by bold booksellers and enterprising poets.
[Nature's] world isbrazen, thepoets onlydeliveragolden.
[This] much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet, and, when you die, your memorydie fromthe earth for want of an epigraph.
Let all the little poets be gathered together in classes And let prizes be given to them by the Prize Asses.
We were obsessed by the feeling that this was the supreme cause of our time. The cause of poets and of writers.The cause of freedom. And that unlessthe cause of anti-Fascism was won, unless Fascism was defeated, we would be unable to exist as writers.
The sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall, The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry, The builder oak, sole king of forests all, The aspen good for staves, the cypress funeral. The laurel, meed of mighty conquerors And poets sage, the fir that weepeth still, The willow worn of forlorn paramours, The ewe obedient to the benders will, The birch for shafts, the sallow for the mill, The myrrh sweet bleeding in the bitter wound, The warlike beech, the ash for nothing ill, The fruitful olive, and the platan round, The carver holme, the maple seldom inward sound.
Say, Britain, could you ever boast, Three poets in an age at most? Our chilling climate hardly bears A sprig of bays in fifty years.
Among the forests Of metal the one human Sound was the lament of The poets for deciduous language.
Poets may boast (as safely-vain) Their work shall with the world remain: Both bound together, live, or die, The verses and the prophecy. But who can hope his lines shou'd long Last, in a daily changing tongue? While they are new, envy prevails, And as that dies, our language fails.
All poets who, when reading from their own works, experience a choked feeling, are major. For that matter, all poets who read from their own works are major, whether they choke or not.
The epitaph on the Kennedyadministration became Camelota magic moment in American history, when gallant men danced with beautiful women, when great deeds were done, when artists, writers and poets met at the White House and the barbarians beyond the walls were held back.
I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride. Of him who walked in glory and in joy Following his plough along the mountainside: By our own spirits are we deified. We poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof comes in the end despondencyand madness.