Poets

"Poets are all who love, — who feel great truths, And tell them."

"A poet not in love is out at sea; He must have a lay-figure."

"Always be a poet, even in prose."

"Poets and anarchists are always the first to go. Where. To the frontline. Wherever it is."

""There's nothing great Nor small," has said a poet of our day, Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eve And not be thrown out by the matin's bell."

"God's prophets of the Beautiful, These Poets were."

"It must be the caress of the useless,/the endless sadness of being a poet,/of singing and singing, without breaking/the peerless tragedy of existence."

"Ovid's a rake, as half his verses show him, Anacreon's morals are a still worse sample, Catullus scarcely has a decent poem, I don't think Sappho's Ode a good example, Although Longinus tells us there is no hymn Where the sublime soars forth on wings more ample; But Virgil's songs are pure, except that horrid one Beginning with "Formosum Pastor Corydon.""

"For a man to become a poet (witness Petrarch and Dante), he must be in love, or miserable."

"A great poet belongs to no country ; his works are public property, and his Memoirs the inheritance of the public."

"Mother and poetess do not rhyme, but they go together rather well."

"A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams."

"The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood."

"A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses."

"To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one."

"There is a pleasure in poetic pains, Which only poets know."

"In this American moment, it's fundamentally queer to be a poet, to be interested in what can't be packaged or sold in the marketplace, queer to enjoy the fundamentally useless, contemplative pleasure of poetry. Queer means that which is not business as usual, not solid identities founded on firm grounds, but a world in question."

"For that fine madness still he did retain Which rightly should possess a poet's brain."

"A poem is a naked person . . . some people say that I am a poet."

"You don't have to write anything down to be a poet. Some work in gas stations. Some shine shoes. I don't really call myself one because I don't like the word. Me? I'm a trapeze artist."

"There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. … To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food."

"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."

"The poet is a truth bearer of reality and image. We live in a society of denial that doesn't want to see or hear these truth tales, so consequently poets are shunned to a great degree because people don't always want to hear the truth...In the old days poets used to go into the factories and the sugar and tobacco plantations and recite to the workers while they were doing their thing. No more. Perhaps it's a fear of intelligence, of language. A fear of self-realization."

"I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds."

"The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation."

"The child alone a poet is: Spring and Fairyland are his. Truth and Reason show but dim, And all's poetry with him."

"To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession."

"Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science."

"Even nowadays an archaic sense of love-innocence recurs, however briefly, among most young men and women. Some few of these, who become poets, remain in love for the rest of their lives, watching the world with a detachment unknown to lawyers, politicians, financiers, and all other ministers of that blind and irresponsible successor to matriarchy and patriarchy — the mechanarchy."

"Heilige Gefäße sind die Dichter, Worin des Lebens Wein, der Geist Der Helden sich aufbewahrt."

"The prose writer drags meaning along with a rope, the poet makes it stand out and hit you."

"Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions…"

"A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no Identity-he is continually informing and filling some other body."

"A poet doesn't always have to be good. You take Ezra Pound; he was a poet in the classic sense, he was a fine poet. Nothing wrong with his poetry except he was a Nazi. He had a different view than we did. You have a picture there of a poet, but a different type of poet."

"Often the poet will take faded words, lying forgotten and cobwebbed. He shakes off their dust, collected over generations, and marries them off to new images. He conducts them to a new breyshis, a second genesis. He also sets words as witnesses to the eternal struggle between justice and injustice, between purity and impurity...a great poet or artist is no coincidence in the history of a people. He is the logical consequence of historical developments, a product of ceaseless labor that has lasted generations. Centuries are spent toiling in the dark laboratory of the national subconscious in order to produce such a perfect individual who could become the people’s memory, its tongue, and—its conscience. His rise may not be attributed only to himself but rather, should be considered an answer to the nation’s concealed questioning of its own fears, of its own dreams. Only then, when the people itself is creative, when it searches and struggles, when it collects its debts from itself alone, the answer comes—in the form of a tremendous poetic talent."

"There cannot be a greater error than to suppose that the poet does not feel what he writes. What an extraordinary, I might say, impossible view, is this to take of an art more connected with emotion than any of its sister sciences. What — the depths of the heart are to be sounded, its mysteries unveiled, and its beatings numbered by those whose own heart is made by this strange doctrine — a mere machine wound up by the clock-work of rhythm ! No ; poetry is even more a passion than a power, and nothing is so strongly impressed on composition as the character of the writer. I should almost define poetry to be the necessity of feeling strongly in the first instance, and the as strong necessity of confiding in the second."

"People ought to be grateful : I have done a great deal for the poets ; is there not one among them to do something for me ? I entreat them to recollect that I have read them, which is a great deal ; I have bought them, which is still more ; and I have reduced their theory to practice, which is most of all. They owe me a recompense, and I have a plan in my head. I want one of them to come and commit suicide in my garden, and leave a paper behind requesting to be interred in that very spot. He might assign any reason his imagination suggested, and I would take care that religious attention should be paid to his last wish ; indeed, it is for that I desire his death."

"For next to being a great poet is the power of understanding one."

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

"It is indeed astonishing that all are obsessed with poets and cannot tear themselves away from them. You would think that once they were read, that was that. Transcended, as they say now. Nothing could be farther from the truth."

"The authentic artist carries within himself another world to which the ordinary person has no access. The great value of the poet is that he enriches us with new, thoroughly experienced feelings, with unseen or differently seen landscapes."

"half-holy, half-criminal,/or altogether a poet."

"Poets and priests were one in the beginning, and they only separated in later times. But the real poet is always a priest, just as the real priest always remains a poet."

"All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful."

"when people say, “What can poets do?” I often say, “Just what any other working group could do to get anything accomplished, and that is to organize.”"

"σοφὸς ὁ πολλὰ εἰδὼς φυᾷ."

"At any rate, at his [the God of Love] touch every man becomes a poet "though formerly unvisited by the Muse"."

"While pensive poets painful vigils keep, Sleepless themselves to give their readers sleep."

"Dulness! whose good old cause I yet defend, With whom my muse began, with whom shall end."

"Poets don't drive. Never trust a poet who can drive. Never trust a poet at the wheel. If he can drive, distrust the poems."