What Is A Poet Quotes

A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.

Does it mean this, does it mean that, that's all anybody wants to know. I'd say what any decent poet would say if anyone dared ask him to analyze his work: if you see it, darling, then it's there!

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

Of all the arts the living of a life is perhaps the greatest; to live every moment of life with the same imaginative commitment as the poet brings to a special field.

The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.

A paranoiac, like a poet, is born, not made.

Commemoration of John Donne, Priest, Poet, 1631 He was the Word that spake it; He took the bread and brake it; And what that Word did make it I do believe, and take it.

When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man.

All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal.

The poet does not know - often he will never know - whom he really writes for.

He that would earn the Poet's sacred name, Must write for future as for present ages.

Two attributes of a poet, avidity of the eye and the desire to describe that which he sees.

Good poets borrow, great poets steal

Walt Whitman and Emerson are the poets who have given the world more than anyone else. Perhaps Whitman is not so widely read in England, but England never appreciates a poet until he is dead.

The only thing we all agree on, virtually every poet in this country, is that this Administration is really frightening, and we want something done about it.

In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue.

Someone told me just recently that poets are eulogists. It's their job, to eulogize. I didn't know that, but it makes sense. Because in almost every poem of mine there is a loss.

Kevin Smith is so great in 'Kingdom Come,' isn't he? He's kind of this very earthy poet. He just has this immediate gregariousness, like, you kind of just want to be his pal.

The antagonism between the poet and the politician has generally been evident in all cultures.

Honor is the greatest poet.

Part of the glamour of being a poet was always this long reach into the future. You knew you were managing time.

What are we singers but the silver-voiced messengers of the poet and the musician?

The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.

A true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet.

Poets are like proverbs: you can always find one to contradict another.

The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.

To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.

You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It’s only that.

The poet is the one who breaks through our habits.

He consorted with prostitutes and poets...and with persons even worse.

God is the perfect poet, Who in his person acts his own creations.

Is encouragement what the poet needs? Open question. Maybe he needs discouragement. In fact, quite a few of them need more discouragement, the most discouragement possible.

Don't saddle me with your ideals, and spare me all your guilt. For a poet with all the answers, has never yet been built.

Children when they ask you why your mama so funny say she is a poet she don't have no sense

The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.

In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.

Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.

In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.

The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.

A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.

Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.

And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous, He must die a little death each morning, He must swallow his toad and study his vomit as Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval.

Whatever a poet writes with enthusiasm and a divine inspiration is very fine. Earliest reference to the madness or divine inspiration of poets.

The poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation.

Sweetheart, when you break thru you'll find a poet here, not quite what one would choose.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience ?in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

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.

Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.