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poet QUOTES

poet QUOTES

41 " The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head. "

― G.K. Chesterton

42 " Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread. "

― Pablo Neruda

43 " Such was a poet and shall be and is
-who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand. "

― E.E. Cummings

44 " A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits. "

― Robert A. Heinlein

45 " The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness. "

― Christopher Morley

46 " The poet must always, in every instance, have the vibrant word... that by it's trenchancy can so wound my soul that it whimpers.... One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word; one must be able to give one's writing unexpected effects. It must have a hectic, anguished vehemence, so that it rushes past like a gust of air, and it must have a latent, roistering tenderness so that it creeps and steals one's mind; it must be able to ring out like a sea-shanty in a tremendous hour, in the time of the tempest, and it must be able to sigh like one who, in tearful mood, sobs in his inmost heart. "

― Knut Hamsun

47 " How to be a Poet (to remind myself)Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity… Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. "

48 " To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. "

― George Eliot , Middlemarch

49 " while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space,
the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. "

― Vladimir Nabokov

50 " The poet doesn't invent. He listens. "

51 " The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world. "

― Ted Hughes

52 " You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket. "

― Abigail Adams , The Letters of John and Abigail Adams

53 " We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it. "

― Kim Addonizio , The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry

54 " Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free. "

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

55 " I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order. "

― Mary Karr , Lit

56 " If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.

Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic. "

― Walker Percy , Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

57 " Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64) "

― Robert Frost , Interviews with Robert Frost

58 " Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. "

― T.S. Eliot , Collected Poems, 1909-1962

59 " The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly. "

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

60 " Give a poet a pen "

― A. Jarrell Hayes