“Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.”

— Wole Soyinka

Last update Feb. 10, 2022. History

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Wole Soyinka 11

Nigerian writer 1934

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“Apparently that does sometimes happen. Apparently even men like Chichikov are transformed into poets for a few moments in their lives: though the word "poet" would be an exaggeration here.”

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“As poets we tend to not like the word “responsibility. I think it’s one of the major responsibilities of the poet.”

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“You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.”

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“Sometimes I think Johnson´s Lives of the English Poets is all I need to be happy.”

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“SOME YEARS, like some poets, and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year.”

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“There are two classes of poets — the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.”

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“We now give more serious weight to the words of a country's poets than to the words of its politicians — though we know the latter may interfere more drastically with our lives.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

Poetry International Programme note (1967); also in Selected Translations (2006), edited by Daniel Weissbort, p. 10
Context: However rootedly national it may be, poetry is less and less the prisoner of its own language. It is beginning to represent as an ambassador, something far greater than itself. Or perhaps, it is only now being heard for what, among other thngs, it is — a universal language of understanding, coherent behind the many languages in which we can all hope to meet. … We now give more serious weight to the words of a country's poets than to the words of its politicians — though we know the latter may interfere more drastically with our lives. Religions, ideologies, mercantile competition divide us. The essential solidarity of the very diverse poets of the world, besides being mysterious fact is one we can be thankful for, since its terms are exclusively those of love, understanding and patience. It is one of the few spontaneous guarantees of possible unity that mankind can show, and the revival of an appetite for poetry is like a revival of an appetite for all man's saner possibilities, and a revulsion from the materialist cataclysms of recent years and the worse ones which the difference of nations threatens for the years ahead.
The idea of global unity is not new, but the absolute necessity of it has only just arrived, like a sudden radical alteration of the sun, and we shall have to adapt or disappear. If the nations are ever to make a working synthesis of their ferocious contradictions, the plan will be created in spirit before it can be formulated or accepted in political fact. And it is in poetry that we can refresh our hope that such a unity is occupying people's imaginations everywhere, since poetry is the voice of spirit and imagination and all that is potential, as well as of the healing benevolence that used to be the privilege of the gods.

“Without some affinity in human ideas art would certainly be impossible; but it can never be exactly determined how far the intentions of the poet are realized.”

Gottlob Frege Sense and reference

Gottlob Frege (1892). On Sense and Reference.
Über Sinn und Bedeutung, 1892

“Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.”

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Wole Soyinka 11

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