“The clock of doom had struck as fated;
the poet, without a sound,
let fall his pistol on the ground.”
Source: Eugene Onegin (1823), Ch. 6, st. 30.
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Aleksandr Pushkin 33
Russian poet 1799–1837Related quotes

“Fate, and the dooming gods, are deaf to tears.”
Aeneis, Book VI, line 512.
The Works of Virgil (1697)

Nobel lecture (8 December 1980)
Context: Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search for reality, is he dangerous. In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot. And, alas, a temptation to pronounce it, similar to an acute itching, becomes an obsession which doesn't allow one to think of anything else. That is why a poet chooses internal or external exile. It is not certain, however, that he is motivated exclusively by his concern with actuality. He may also desire to free himself from it and elsewhere, in other countries, on other shores, to recover, at least for short moments, his true vocation — which is to contemplate Being.

Source: Beatrice & Virgil (2010), p. 173

“A pun is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.”
Popular Fallacies: IX, That the Worst Puns Are the Best.
Last Essays of Elia (1833)

1900s, A Free Man's Worship (1903)

“A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.”

“On a poet's lips I slept
Dreaming like a love-adept
In the sound his breathing kept.”
Fourth Spirit, Act I, l. 737
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)