Source: The Shipping News (1993), P. 53
“But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.”
On T. S. Eliot (1984) by Peter Ackroyd, in which the Eliot estate forbade quotation from Eliot’s books and letters, The New Yorker (25 March 1985)
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John Updike 240
American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, an… 1932–2009Related quotes
“A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.”
Robert A. Heinlein
(1907–1988) American science fiction author
“Thy rare gold ring of verse (the poet praised)
Linking our England to his Italy.”
Book XII: The Book and the Ring, line 873.
The Ring and the Book (1868-69)
William Baziotes
(1912–1963) American painter
The Artist and His Mirror, W. Baziotes, in Right Angle Vol. III, no. 2, Washington DC, June 1949
1940s
“And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.”
Source: Leaves of Grass
Ryōkan
(1758–1831) Japanese Buddhist monk
Variant translation:
With gaudy words their lines are formed
And further adorned by novel and curious phrases.
Yet if they fail to express what is in their own minds
What is the use, no matter
How many poems they compose!
"Zen Poetics of Ryokan" in Simply Haiku: A Quarterly Journal of Japanese Short Form Poetry (Summer 2006)
Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf : Zen Poems of Ryokan (1993)