A great poet QUOTES

1 " Aeneas' mother is a star?" " No; a goddess." I said cautiously, " Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus." He thought it over. Perhaps having grown up in the country, among pagans like me, helped him understand my bewilderment. " So do we, he said. " But Venus also became more...With the help of the Greeks. They call her Aphrodite...There was a great poet who praised her in Latin. Delight of men and gods, he called her, dear nurturer. Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being; through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun; from her the storm clouds flee; to her the earth, the skillful maker, offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her, and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light..." It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy. "

2 " When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can’t suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy—or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn’t shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all. "

― Dorothea Lasky

3 " I am frequently asked by people if I would like to be known or remembered for being a Great Poet or a Great Writer. The simple answer is this:

There are many Great Poets and even more Great Writers, thus I answer and say, I would like to be remembered as a capable poet that was a good writer that possessed a truly loving soul, and that all may know, for me, this was great enough. "

― Tonny K. Brown

4 " As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that line
does me no good, because, as I’ve already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless. "

― Jorge Luis Borges

5 " Did you know that Bharatiyar used the pen name “Shelley-dasan”? He admired the poems of Shelley so deeply that he wrote under the name “Shelley’s servant”. Wasn’t that a wonderful gesture of humility by someone
who was such a great poet himself? And later, Bharatiyar had his own dasan, the poet Subburathinam, who took
the pen name Bharathidasan. Subburathinam’s poetry inspired yet another poet who wrote as Surada, short for Subburathina-dasan. And to think this long chain of inspiration spans centuries, going back to the poets who inspired Wordsworth, who inspired Shelley, who inspired our own Bharati. "

― Indu Muralidharan , The Reengineers

6 " The genius of happiness is still so rare is indeed on the whole the rarest genius. To possess it means to approach life with the humility of a beggar but to treat it with the proud generosity of a prince to bring to its totality the deep understanding of a great poet and to each of its moments the abandonment and ingenuousness of a child. "

7 " Love is a great poet its resources are inexhaustible but if the end it has in view is not obtained it feels weary and remains silent. "

8 " No man was ever yet a great poet without at the same time being a profound philosopher. "

9 " When a great poet has lived certain things have been done once for all and cannot be achieved again. "

10 " With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. "