Sunday, June 17, 2012

Now Here's Some Quotes About Poets.......

  • A poet not in love is out at sea;
    He must have a lay-figure.
  • Always be a poet, even in prose.
  • "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.
  • 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.
    • Lord Byron, Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron by Thomas Medwin (1823).
  • A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.
    • René Char, as quoted in The French-American Review (1976) by Texas Christian University, p. 132.
    • Variant translation: A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Only traces bring about dreams.
      • As quoted in Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics (2000) by Roland Bleiker, p. 50.
  • 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.
  • There is a pleasure in poetic pains,
    Which only poets know.
    • William Cowper, The Task (1785), Book II, line 285. Same in Wordsworth, Miscellaneous Sonnets. Knight's ed, VII. 160.
  • For that fine madness still he did retain
    Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.
  • 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.
    • T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (1920) "Philip Massinger".
  • I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.
    • Michael Faraday, in lecture notes of 1858, quoted in The Life and Letters of Faraday (1870) by Bence Jones, Vol. 2, p. 403.
  • The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.
  • To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.
    • Robert Graves, in a reply to a questionnaire in “The Cost of Letters” in Horizon (September 1946).
  • 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.
    • Robert Graves, in "Mammon" an address at the London School of Economics (6 December 1963); published in Mammon and the Black Goddess (1965).
  • 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.
  • Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions…
    • David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), section X.
  • A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no Identity-he is continually informing and filling some other body.
    • John Keats, letter to Richard Woodhouse (27 October 1818).
  • Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
  • All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.
  • At any rate, at his [the God of Love] touch every man becomes a poet "though formerly unvisited by the Muse".
    • Plato, The Symposium section 196.
  • 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 like painters, thus unskill'd to trace
    The naked nature and the living grace,
    With gold and jewels cover every part,
    And hide with ornaments their want of art.
  • And as to the poets, those who go astray follow them.
  • A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.
  • He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
  • For ne'er
    Was flattery lost on Poet's ear;
    A simple race! they waste their toil
    For the vain tribute of a smile.
    • Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) canto IV, stanza 35.
Call it not vain: — they do not err,
Who say that, when the Poet dies,
Mute Nature mourns her worshipper,
And celebrates his obsequies.
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1 comment:

  1. UnknownJune 18, 2012 at 11:17 PM

    nice one!!....

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