What It Means to Be a Poet in America (1926)
Context: Whenever I begin to write a poem or draw a picture I am, in imagination, if not in reality, back in my room where I began to draw pen-and-ink pictures and write verses in my seventeenth year. Both windows of the room look down on the great Governor’s Yard of Illinois. This yard is a square block, a beautiful park. Our house is on so high a hill I can always look down upon the governor. Among my very earliest memories are those of seeing old Governor Oglesby leaning on his cane, marching about, calling his children about him.
“There is no such thing as a cheerful poem [... ] Happiness writes in water, not ink.”
Ch 2
The Rahotep series, Book 3: Egypt: The Book of Chaos (2011)
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Nick Drake (poet) 41
British writer 1961Related quotes
Quote from a 1962 essay by Andre; as quoted in ' Objects Are What We Aren't' https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/02/26/objects-are-what-we-arent/, by Andy Battaglia; The Parish Review, February 26, 2015
“Writing things down is dangerous. Ink can’t be erased without leaving a mess behind.”
Spying on Strange Men (2013)
“Modern poets put a lot of water into their ink.”
Neuere Poeten tun viel Wasser in die Tinte.
Maxim 749, trans. Stopp
Variant translation: Modern poets mix a lot of water with their ink.
Maxims and Reflections (1833)
“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.”
Source: Nothing Twice: Selected Poems
“…whether they write poems or don’t write poems, poets are best.”
“Recent Poetry”, p. 227
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
“The Obscurity of the Poet”, p. 24
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Context: People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to answer, For whom do you do good? Are you kind to your daughter because in the end someone will pay you for being?... The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it.
As quoted in Al-Jaami' al-Saghîr by Imam al-Suyuti, where it is declared a "weak Hadith".
Variant translations:
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr.
The Islamic Review, Vol. 22 (1934), p. 105, edited by Khwajah Kamal al-Din
The ink of scholars will be weighed in the scale with the blood of martyrs.
As quoted in Knowledge of God in Classical Sufism: Foundations of Islamic Mystical Theology (2004) by John Renard
Sunni Hadith
“I was going to write a poem, I was stifling, fed up with old things”
"How Awful When Poetry Ages As It Is Read"
I've Learned Some Things (2008)
Context: Gulls into the water, women proudly into the bazaars
I was going to write a poem, I was stifling, fed up with old things
Eat, my mother says, but they're all things I've grown accustomed to, in the end.
Like Camus and — I don’t know — people like that, I'm cracking up
Everything will begin when it untangles itself from your hair