Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 672
“I didn’t know at that time Emily Dickinson’s great definition, her 'Publication is not the business of poets’; being a poet is all, being known as a poet is nothing.”
Daniel Martin (1977)
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John Fowles 120
British writer 1926–2005Related quotes
Kenneth Rexroth, as quoted in Ramez Qureshi on Stuart Merrill's The White Tomb: Selected Writing http://home.jps.net/~nada/merrill.htm
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“No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.”
Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XV
“The poets are in the vanguard of a changed conception of Being.”
Letter to James Laughlin (14 January 1944), published in The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams (1957) edited by John C. Thirlwall, p. 219
General sources
Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 637
National Book Award Acceptance Speech (1957)
Context: When a poet is being a poet — that is, when he is writing or thinking about writing — he cannot be concerned with anything but the making of a poem. If the poem is to turn out well, the poet cannot have thought of whether it will be saleable, or of what its effect on the world should be; he cannot think of whether it will bring him honor, or advance a cause, or comfort someone in sorrow. All such considerations, whether silly or generous, would be merely intrusive; for, psychologically speaking, the end of writing is the poem itself.
As quoted in Conversations of Lord Byron with Thomas Medwin (1832), Preface.