Quotes about poet
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“Bujak spoke of Einstein as if he were God's literary critic, God being a poet. I, more stolidly, tend to suspect that God is a novelist — a garrulous and deeply unwholesome one too.”

Martin Amis book Einstein's Monsters

"Bujak and the Strong Force"
Einstein's Monsters (1987)

God

“To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

Literature, Problem, Painting

“At the following morning, when the first citizens started walking around, he was found dead. So died the poor and brave Antônio da Silva Marramaque who, at the age of 18, dreamed with the glories of poetry and was now murdered due his great soul and brave moral! He didn't compose any sonnet and, if he did, he composed bad ones. But, by his way, he was a hero and a poet… that God bless him!”

Lima Barreto book Clara dos Anjos

Clara dos Anjos (1948)

God, Age, Dreams, Way

“The poet is always concerned with achieving a balance between the inner and the outer world; it is his business to hold in a single thought reality and justice.”

Michael Roberts (writer) (1902–1948) English schoolteacher and man of letters

Two Alternatives? in ' T E Hulme ',Carcanet Press,Manchester, 1982

World, Justice, Business, Reality

“"How divine is utterance!" she said. "As we to the brutes, poets are to us."”

George Meredith (1828–1909) British novelist and poet of the Victorian era

Source: Diana of the Crossways http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4470/4470.txt (1885), Ch. 16.

“What does an instinctively popular poet do in contemporary America, where serious poetry is no longer a popular art? The public whose values and sensibility he celebrates is unaware of his existence. Indeed, even if they were aware of his poetry, they would feel no need to approach it. Cut off from his proper audience, this poet feels little sympathy with the specialized minority readership that now sustains poetry either as a highly sophisticated verbal game or secular religion. His sensibility shows little similarity to theirs except for the common interest in poetry. And so the popular poet usually leads a marginal existence in literary life. His fellow poets look on him as an anomaly or an anachronism. Reviewers find him eminently unnewsworthy. Publishers see little prestige attached to printing his work. Critics, who have been trained to celebrate complexity, consider him an amiable simpleton.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"The Anonymity of the Regional Poet: Ted Kooser" http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ekooser.htm, from Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (1992) Essays

Life, Religion, Art, Feeling

“Yeah, well, I subscribe to the Umberto Eco view that Noel is a Poet and Liam is a town crier.”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

Gigwise, 1997
Oasis (band)

“Some great poet or philosopher once said that " he who goes to nature for comfort must go to her empty handed ", and I think he was right.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

January Chapter The Peverel Papers - A yearbook of the countryside ed Julian Shuckburgh Century Hutchinson 1986
The Peverel Papers

Nature, Thinking

“To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Statement (5 August 1888), as quoted in The life of Thomas Hardy 1840-1928 (1962) by Florence Emily Hardy

Beauty

“A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

Burns (1828).
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)

Love

“As part of the spring ritual of National Poetry Month, poets are symbolically dragged into the public square in order to be humiliated with the claim that their product has not achieved sufficient market penetration and must be revived by the Artificial Resuscitation Foundation (ARF) lest the art form collapse from its own incompetence, irrelevance, and as a result of the general disinterest among the broad masses of the American People. The motto of ARF's National Poetry Month is: "Poetry's not so bad, really."”

Charles Bernstein (1950) American writer

" Against National Poetry Month As Such http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/044106.html", from My Way: Speeches and Poems, 1999, University Of Chicago Press, ISBN 0226044092

People, Art, Spring, Parting

“I don't want to have the territory of a man's mind fenced in. I don't want to shut out the mystery of the stars and the awful hollow that holds them. We have done with those hypaethral temples, that were open above to the heavens, but we can have attics and skylights to them. Minds with skylights…
One-story intellects, two-story intellects, three-story intellects, with skylights. All fact-collectors, who have no aim beyond their facts, are one-story men. Two-story men compare, reason, generalize, using the labors of the fact-collectors as well as their own. Three-story men idealize, imagine, predict; their best illumination comes from above, through the skylight. There are minds with large ground floors, that can store an infinite amount of knowledge; some librarians, for instance, who know enough of books to help other people, without being able to make much other use of their knowledge, have intellects of this class. Your great working lawyer has two spacious stories; his mind is clear, because his mental floors are large, and he has room to arrange his thoughts so that he can get at them,—facts below, principles above, and all in ordered series; poets are often narrow below, incapable of clear statement, and with small power of consecutive reasoning, but full of light, if sometimes rather bare of furniture in the attics.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872)

Men, People, Books, Imagination

“The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that Finis vitae sed non amoris [Life ends but not love], is a lie, useless and not even funny.”

Stanisław Lem book Solaris

Source: Solaris (1961), Ch. 14: "The Old Mimoid", p. 204

Love, Death, Lie, Age

“Composer, sculptor, painter, poet, prophet, sage, these are the makers of the after-world, the architects of heaven.”

James Allen (1864–1912) British philosophical writer

As A Man Thinketh (1902), Visions and Ideals

World

“Yes I'm talking about this war dance
A patriotic romance
And I know all you poets
Have seen it all before
About the stirring of those young hearts
Back in the first world war”

Colin Moulding (1955) English bassist, songwriter and vocalist

"War Dance"
Nonsuch (1992)

War, World, Heart, Dance

“Martial force is the basis of all political virtues; in the rich treasure of Germany's glories the Prussian military glory is a jewel as precious, as loyally acquired as the masterpieces of our poets and our thinkers; the sacred character of the allegiance to the flag is a witness to the moral force of our people. Therefore let our Liberalism return to those ancient German convictions.”

Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896) Historian, political writer

Statement (1869), quoted in W. W. Coole (ed.), Thus Spake Germany (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1941), p. 59.

People

“Technical criticism in particular is the despair of the artist. No one but an idiot would offer a poet his comments in terms of spondees and trochees; why must the painter daily suffer the indignity? Any picture which makes one conscious first of its technical qualities, good or bad, is not a good picture, whatever else it may be.”

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

The Artist Speaks (1951)

Suffering, Despair

“We may have an excellent Ear in Musick, without being able to perform in any kind. We may judg well of Poetry, without being Poets, or possessing the least of a Poetick Vein: But we can have no tolerable Notion of Goodness, without being tolerably good.”

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) English politician and Earl

Vol. 1, p. 26; "A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm".
Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711)

“We come from geek culture, we come from the free software movement, we have a lot of technologists involved. If we had done the same sort of comparison on poets or artists, I think that we would not have fared nearly as well.”

Jimmy Wales (1966) Wikipedia co-founder and American Internet entrepreneur

Wales to the Miami Herald, "Will Wikipedia change history?" http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/technology/15328352.htm

Thinking

“If you were an artist or novelist, or a poet or somebody like that, nobody would think it odd if you worked in your own home. In science there's none of this at all. I'm almost the only independent scientist in Britain. Everybody else works in large institutions, universities, or industrial labs. Why should one expect scientists to work that way?”

James E. Lovelock (1919) independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist

"The Man Who Named the World" (1990)

Way, Home, Thinking, Universe

“And you, beloved children, whose lost it is to promote learning under the magisterium of the Church, continue as you are doing to love and tend the noble poet whom We do not hesitate to call the most eloquent singer of the Christian idea.”

Pope Benedict XV (1854–1922) 258th Pope of the Catholic Church

In Praeclara Summorum http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xv/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xv_enc_30041921_in-praeclara-summorum_en.html (1921-04-30)

Love, Children, Idea, Learning

“Poets and prophets do not go into committees.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Eminent Indians (1947)

“To be a poet is to be a visitor on a distant shore until one dies. In the land where I belong, but which I shall never reach, individuals have no cares, and that is because industry runs by itself without anyone trying to steal from others. My land is a land of plenty; it is the world that Nature has given to mankind, where society is not a thieves' society, where the children aren't sickly but healthy and contented, and young men and women can fulfill their aspirations because it is natural to do so. In my world it is possible to fulfill all aspirations, and therefore all aspirations are in themselves good, quite unlike here, where people's aspirations are called wicked because it isn't possible to fulfill them.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Ólafur
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Three: The House of the Poet

Women, Men, Children, People

“The first Bengali with a scientific insight to attack the problems of the language was the poet Rabindranath Tagore; and it is flattering for the votaries of philology, to find in one who is the greatest writer in the language, and a great poet and seer for all time, a keen philologist as well, distinguished alike by an assiduous enquiry into the facts of the language as by a scholarly appreciation of the methods and findings of the modern Western philologist. The work of Rabindranath is in the shape of a few essays (now collected in one volume) on Bengali Phonetics, Bengali Onomatopoetics, and on the Bengali noun, and on other topics, the earliest of which appeared in the early nineties, and some fresh papers appeared only several years ago. These papers may be said to have shown to the Bengali enquiring into the problems of his language the proper lines of approaching them.”

Suniti Kumar Chatterji (1890–1977) Bengali linguist

S.K. Chatterji (1926) in: S.K. Chatterji. " Visva-manah Vak-pati http://books.google.nl/books?id=9x-Peh32rw8C&pg=PA124" in: Rabindranath Tagore: A Centenary. S. Radhakrishnan eds. Sahitya Akademi. 1990. p. 124

Problem, Appearance, Time

“Well, he wrote a book -- well, maybe here I'm being political -- he wrote a book about the tyrants of South America, and then he had several stanzas against the United States. Now he knows that that's rubbish. And he had not a word against Perón. Because he had a law suit in Buenos Aires, that was explained to me afterwards, and he didn't care to risk anything. And so, when he was supposed to be writing at the top of his voice, full of noble indignation, he had not a word to say against Perón. And he was married to an Argentine lady, he knew that many of his friends had been sent to jail. He knew all about the state of our country, but not a word against him. At the same time, he was speaking against the United States, knowing the whole thing was a lie, no? But, of course, that doesn't mean anything against his poetry. Neruda is a very fine poet, a great poet in fact. And when they gave Miguel de Asturias the Nobel Prize, I said that it should have been given to Neruda! Now when I was in Chile, and we were on different political sides, I think he did the best thing to do. He went on a holiday during the three or four days I was there so there was no occasion for our meeting. But I think he was acting politely, no? Because he knew that people would be playing him up against me, no? I mean, I was an Argentine, poet, he was a Chilean poet, he's on the side of the Communists, I'm against them. So I felt he was behaving very wisely in avoiding a meeting that would have been quite uncomfortable for both of us.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Page 96.
Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (1968)

People, Lie, Books, Law

“In paper, many a poet now survives
Or else their lines had perish'd with their lives.
Old Chaucer, Gower, and Sir Thomas More,
Sir Philip Sidney, who the laurel wore,
Spenser, and Shakespeare did in art excell,
Sir Edward Dyer, Greene, Nash, Daniel.
Sylvester, Beaumont, Sir John Harrington,
Forgetfulness their works would over run
But that in paper they immortally
Do live in spite of death, and cannot die.”

John Taylor (1578–1653) English poet of the 16th and 17th centuries

From "The Praise of Hemp-seed" http://ebooks.gutenberg.us/Renascence_Editions/taylor1.html, published 1620. This is the earliest surviving printed reference to the death of William Shakespeare and Francis Beaumont, who had both died in 1616.

Death, Art, Forgetting

“It is not my purpose as a poet to condemn war (or to be exact, modern warfare). I only wish to present the universal aspects of a particular event”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

Note appended to his poem The End of War (1933)
Literary Quotes

War, Universe

“To the Young Artists of Italy!
The cry of rebellion that we launch, linking our ideals with those of the Futurist poets, does not originate in an aesthetic clique. It expresses the violent desire that stirs in the veins of every creative artist today.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

Original text:
Agli artisti giovani d'Italia!
Il grido di ribellione che noi lanciamo, associando i nostri ideali a quelli dei poeti futuristi, non parte già da una chiesuola estetica, ma esprime il violento desiderio che ribolle oggi nelle vene di ogni artista creatore.
Source: 1910, Manifesto of Futurist Painters', Feb. 1910, p. 24: Lead paragraph

Cry

“Alone! — that worn-out word,
So idly spoken, and so coldly heard;
Yet all that poets sing and grief hath known
Of hopes laid waste, knells in that word ALONE!”

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) English novelist, poet, playwright, and politician

The New Timon, (1846). Part ii.

Hope, Singing

“When we reflect that all the aspects of Nature, all the emotions of the soul, and all the events of life, have been the subjects of poetry for hundreds and thousands of years, we can hardly wonder that there should be so many resemblances and coincidences of expression among poets, but rather that they are not more numerous and more striking.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

Table-Talk (1857)

Life, Soul, Nature

“"Sixty years ago Catholics played a prominent, prestigious, and irreplaceable part in American literary culture…They included established fiction writers--Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, J. F. Powers, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Horgan, Jack Kerouac, Julien Green, Pietro di Donato, Hisaye Yamamoto, Edwin O'Connor, Henry Morton Robinson, and Caroline Gordon. (Sociologist Father Andrew Greeley had yet to try his formidable hand at fiction.)…also science fiction and detective writers such as Anthony Boucher, Donald Westlake, August Delerth, and Walter Miller, Jr."…in American poetry…Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Kenneth Rexroth, John Berryman, Isabella Gardner, Phyllis McGinley, Claude McKay, Dunstan Thompson, John Frederick Nims, Brother Antoninus (William Everson), Thomas Merton, Josephine Jacobsen, and the Berrigan brothers, Ted and Daniel…. There were even Catholic haiku poets, notably Raymond Roseliep and Nick Virgilio" (15-16).”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Science, Parting

“And muse on Nature with a poet's eye.”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

Part II, line 98
Pleasures of Hope (1799)

Nature

“The Futurists were the first painters, poets, and architects who exalted modern work with their art—
they painted speeding automobiles—
they painted lamps bursting with light—
they painted steaming locomotives and swift bicyclists—
the Futurists stylized their compositions, adopting a violently colored look; with synoptic and geometric shapes they multiplied and decomposed the rhythms of objects and landscapes in order to increase their dynamic qualities and to give an effective rendering of their swift ideas, the states of mind, their conceptions.”

Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) Italian painter, writer, sculptor and graphic designer

Depero (1931) "Futurism and Adverticing Art"; Republished in: Futurism : an anthology http://modernistarchitecture.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/ebooksclub-org__futurism__an_anthology__henry_mcbride_series_in_modernism_.pdf. edited by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, (2011), p. 290

Art, Color, Idea, Light

“Poets are wiser than anyone because they’re the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time.”

Fritz Leiber book The Big Time

The Big Time (1958)

People, Feeling, Thinking, Time

“The experience on that movie (Dead Poets Society) was, for lack of a better term, life-altering. Peter Weir has a unique talent for making movies that are intelligent but also mainstream. I've never been terribly successful at doing that.”

Ethan Hawke (1970) American actor and writer

The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2000/dec/08/culture.features1 (2000-12-08) 2000&ndash;2004

Life, Intelligence, Success, Dead

“A poet educated to his finger tips will tend to be allusive”

Kenneth Allott (1912–1973) Irish poet

Introduction Contemporary Verse, Ed Kenneth Allott, Penguin Books, London 1950

Education

“In the last few years there has been a harvest of books and lectures about the "Mysterious Universe." The inconceivable magnitudes with which astronomy deals produce a sense of awe which lends itself to a poetic and philosophical treatment. "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy hands, the moon and the starts, whuch thou hast ordained: what is man that thou art mindful of him? The literary skill with which this branch of science has been exploited compels one's admiration, but alos, a little, one's sense of the ridiculous. For other facts than those of astronomy, oother disciplines than of mathematics, can produce the same lively feelings of awe and reverence: the extraordinary finenness of their adjustments to the world outside: the amazing faculties of the human mind, of which we know neither whence it comes not whither it goes. In some fortunate people this reverence is produced by the natural bauty of a landscape, by the majesty of an ancient building, by the heroism of a rescue party, by poetry, or by music. God is doubtless a Mathematician, but he is also a Physiologist, an Engineer, a Mother, an Architect, a Coal Miner, a Poet, and a Gardener. Each of us views things in his own peculiar war, each clothes the Creator in a manner which fits into his own scheme. My God, for instance, among his other professions, is an Inventor: I picture him inventing water, carbon dioxide, and haemoglobin, crabs, frogs, and cuttle fish, whales and filterpassing organisms ( in the ratio of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1 in size), and rejoicing greatly over these weird and ingenious things, just as I rejoice greatly over some simple bit of apparatus. But I would nor urge that God is only an Inventor: for inventors are apt, as those who know them realize, to be very dull dogs. Indeed, I should be inclined rather to imagine God to be like a University, with all its teachers and professors together: not omittin the students, for he obviously possesses, judging from his inventions, that noblest human characteristic, a sense of humour.”

Archibald Hill (1886–1977) English physiologist and biophysicist

The Ethical Dilemma of Science and Other Writings https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=zaE1AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false (1960, Cap 1. Scepticism and Faith, p. 41)

God, War, People, Books

“A modern poet has characterized the personality of art and the impersonality of science as follows: Art is I: Science is We.”

Claude Bernard (1813–1878) French physiologist

Bulletin of New York Academy of Medicine, Vol. IV (1928)

Art, Science, Personality

“As poets we do not ask permission before we begin to practise, for there is no authority to license us. We do not inquire whether it is still possible to pen a drama, for the answer to that question is ours alone to give. It is our drama, spoken or sung, that asserts our right to the title of poet. It is our decision that counts, and not the opinion of some theatre management, or the ponderings of the critic, or even the advice of our friendliest mentors.”

James Fenton (1949) poet

Source: An Introduction to English Poetry (2002), Ch. 22: Poetic Drama and Opera (p. 125)

Question, Decision

“The Satan of the Italian and English poets may be poetic; but the German Satan is satanic; and thus one could say that Satan is a German invention.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Der Satan der italienischen und englischen Dichter mag poetischer sein; aber der deutsche Satan ist satanischer; und insofern könnte man sagen, der Satan sei eine deutsche Erfindung.
Athenäumsfragmente 379; the Italian and English poets referred to are Dante, and John Milton.
Athenäum (1798 - 1800)

“The poetical character… is not itself — it has no self — it is every thing and nothing — It has no character — it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it fair or foul, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. — It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philospher, delights the camelion poet.”

John Keats Letter to Richard Woodhouse

Letter to Richard Woodhouse (October 27, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)

Light

“Some poets still write about the hair and eyes and body of a beloved and depict scenes of joy when lovers meet to drink and dance and be merry. But that is not the kind of poetry that the Islamic movement, grown on the concept of jihad and martyrdom, wants.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

When the Ayatollah Dictates Poetry http://www.aawsat.net/2015/07/article55344336/when-the-ayatollah-dictates-poetry, Ashraq Al-Awsat (Jul 11, 2015).

Lovers, Drink, Joy, Dance

“When poets — write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

"Writers’ Hunger: Food as Metaphor," New York Times (19 August 1986)

Food, Communication, Sense

“I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Letter to George and Georgiana Keats (October 14, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)

Death, Thinking

“Mayor Macbeth, of Charleston, told General Howard that he did not believe that a bureau at Washington could manage the social relations of the people from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. But the answer to Mayor Macbeth is that he and his companions have managed those relations at a cost to the country of four years of civil war, three thousand millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of lives. The Freedmen's Bureau will hardly be as expensive as that. And while such a bureau merely defends the rights of a certain class under the laws, the aid societies give them that education which in the present state of local feeling would be inevitably withheld. The mighty arch of Sherman, wasting and taming the land, is followed by the noiseless steps of the band of unnamed heroes and heroines who are teaching the people. The soldier drew the furrow, the teacher drops the seed. There is many and many a devoted woman, hidden at this moment in the lowliest cabins of the South, whose name poets will not sing nor historians record, but whose patient toil the eye that marks the sparrow's fall beholds and approves. Not more noble, not more essential, was the work of the bravest and most famous of the heroes who fell in the wild storm of battle, than that of many a woman to us unknown, faithful through privation and exposure and disease, and perishing at the lonely outpost of duty in the act of helping the nation keep its word.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

War, People, Education, Disease

“Modern poets put a lot of water into their ink.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

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)

Water

“There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill and to create. Other men are taxable and exploitable, made for the stable, that is to say, to exercise so called professions.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Il n'existe que trois êtres respectables: le prêtre, le guerrier, le poète. Savoir, tuer et créer. Les autres hommes sont taillables et corvéables, faits pour l'écurie, c'est-à-dire pour exercer ce qu'on appelle des professions.
Journaux intimes (1864–1867; published 1887), Mon cœur mis à nu (1864)

Men, Exercises

“There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.”

Jean Giraudoux The Trojan War Will Not Take Place

Tiger at the Gates (1935)

Truth, Law, Way, Exercises

“Heroes have filled the zodiac of beneficent labors, and then given up their mortal part to the fire without a murmur. Sages and lawgivers have bent their whole nature to the search for truth, and thought themselves happy if they could buy, with the sacrifice of all temporal ease and pleasure, one seed for the future Eden. Poets and priests have strung the lyre with heart-strings, poured out their best blood upon the altar which, reare'd anew from age to age, shall at last sustain the flame which rises to highest heaven. What shall we say of those who, if not so directly, or so consciously, in connection with the central truth, yet, led and fashioned by a divine instinct, serve no less to develop and interpret the open secret of love passing into life, the divine energy creating for the purpose of happiness; — of the artist, whose hand, drawn by a preexistent harmony to a certain medium, moulds it to expressions of life more highly and completely organized than are seen elsewhere, and, by carrying out the intention of nature, reveals her meaning to those who are not yet sufficiently matured to divine it; of the philosopher, who listens steadily for causes, and, from those obvious, infers those yet unknown; of the historian, who, in faith that all events must have their reason and their aim, records them, and lays up archives from which the youth of prophets may be fed. The man of science dissects the statement, verifies the facts, and demonstrates connection even where he cannot its purpose·”

Margaret Fuller book Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

Love, Life, Happiness, Pleasure

“The poets told thy birth
Was welcomed upon earth
By the sweet multitude of shining flowers,
By bursting buds, green leaves, and sunny hours.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The London Literary Gazette, 1832

Flowers, Birth

“"You don't know very much about women, do you?" she said. "Women aren't interested in poets' dreams. They are interested in facts. It doesn't even matter whether the facts are true or not, as long as they match the other facts without leaving a rough seam."”

William Faulkner book The Town

Eula Varner Snopes to Gavin Stevens in Ch. 15
The Town (1957)

Women, Dreams

“He was a very dispirited Poet. He had never expected the world to act in a courteous, seemly, or even sensible manner, and the world had seldom done so; often he had taken heart in the consistency of its rudeness and stupidity. But never before had the world shot the Poet in the abdomen with a musket. This he found not heartening at all.”

Walter M. Miller, Jr. book A Canticle for Leibowitz

Ch 23
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Lux

Stupidity, World, Heart

“A painter must compensate the natural deficiencies of his art. He has but one sentence to utter, but one moment to exhibit. He cannot, like the poet or historian, expatiate.”

Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) English painter, specialising in portraits

Discourses on Art

Art, Nature

“The poet is a king in his realm. His is empire of imagination, in which there are unlimited mansions.”

Elfriede Jelinek book Wonderful, Wonderful Times

P 179
Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)

Imagination

“Through the burgeoning university network, it was suddenly possible to think of oneself as a national poet, even if the nation turned out to consist entirely of English departments.”

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) English-American novelist and essayist

"Hard Times for Poets," p. 85
Essays in Disguise (1990)

Thinking, Universe

“What is a Poet?…He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Preface.
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

Life, Men, Soul, Nature

“Stevens’s poetry makes one understand how valuable it can be for a poet to write a great deal. Not too much of that great deal, ever, is good poetry; but out of quantity can come practice, naturalness, accustomed mastery, adaptations and elaborations and reversals of old ways, new ways, even—so that the poet can put into the poems, at the end of a lifetime, what the end of a lifetime brings him. Stevens has learned to write at will, for pleasure; his methods of writing, his ways of imagining, have made this possible for him as it is impossible for many living poets—Eliot, for instance. Anything can be looked at, felt about, meditated upon, so Stevens can write about anything; he does not demand of his poems the greatest concentration, intensity, dramatic immediacy, the shattering and inexplicable rightness the poet calls inspiration.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p. 65
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Pleasure, Way, Imagination, Understanding

“I was invited to Romania at least once, but was warned that I should not be free to travel where I pleased in the country, but should be more or less confined to the Writers' Union. Because I ceased long ago to be an urban poet and feel claustrophobic in literary conferences, I could not accept such an invitation.”

Michael Hamburger (1924–2007) British translator, poet, critic, memoirist and academic

Interview with Lidia Vianu http://lidiavianu.scriptmania.com/Michael%20Hamburger.htm

Travel, Feeling, Country

“Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 192)

Reality, Madness

“When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them.”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

On Dramatic Poetry (1758)

Imagination, Time, Painting

“A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom — he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.”

E. B. White (1899–1985) American writer

Salt Water Farm http://books.google.com/books?id=njRHAAAAYAAJ&q=%22A+despot+doesn't+fear+eloquent+writers+preaching+freedom+he+fears+a+drunken+poet+who+may+crack+a+joke+that+will+take+hold%22&pg=PA52#v=onepage One Man's Meat (1942)

Fear, Freedom

“Ah! two desires toss about
The poet's feverish blood;
One drives him to the world without,
And one to solitude.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

"Stanzas in Memory of the Author of "Obermann"" (1852), st. 24

World, Solitude

“The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The power, the beauty, and the majesty
That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and watery depths,—all these have vanished;
They live no longer in the faith of reason.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Wallenstein, part i. Act ii, scene 4 (translated from Schiller)
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Faith, Religion, Beauty, Mountain

“Abu Hurayra stated that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, "The most truthful phrase ever said by a poet is the words of Labid: "Everything except Allah is false."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 3, hadith number 490
Sunni Hadith

Truth, Peace, Falseness

“Every Artist is a Cannibal, every Poet is a Thief. All kill for inspiration and sing about their grief”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

"The Fly"
Lyrics, Achtung Baby (1991)

Singing

“The poet's business is not to save the soul of man but to make it worth saving.”

James Elroy Flecker (1884–1915) Poet

Quoted by Louis Untermeyer in Modern British Poetry http://books.google.com/books?id=GiwMAQAAIAAJ&q=%22The+poet's+business%22+%22is+not+to+save+the+soul+of+man+but+to+make+it+worth+saving%22&pg=PA178#v=onepage (1920)

Soul, Business

“The warfare between poetry and philosophy certainly started with Plato, who was both poet and philosopher.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

“A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad — and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"Answers to Questions," from Mid-Century American Poets, edited by John Ciardi, 1950 [p. 171]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

People, Success

“For the attention of the poet-chronicler is fixed on the invisible shackles of selfhood that bind us all. He seems to be describing great events; in reality he does not for one instant forget that he is occupied with the history of souls, depicting the incidence of their experience and knowledge on the external world.”

Sister Nivedita book The Web of Indian Life

[The Web of Indian Life, Ch. VII: The Indian Sagas, http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/wil/wil09.htm, 20 June 2012, Sister Nivedita]
The Web of Indian Life (1904)

World, Soul, History, Knowledge

“Words, their sound and even their very appearance, are, of course, everything to the poet.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

Form in Modern Poetry(1932)

Appearance

“A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.”

René Char (1907–1988) 20th-century French poet

Un poète doit laisser des traces de son passage, non des preuves. Seules les traces font rêver.
As quoted in The French-American Review (1976) by Texas Christian University, p. 132
Variant translation: A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Only traces bring about dreams.
As quoted in Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics (2000) by Roland Bleiker, p. 50

Dreams

“If poets spoke their poetry, they would not need to write it.”

Dennis O'Driscoll (1954–2012) Irish poet, critic

Poetry Quotes

“No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there.”

Peter Ackroyd (1949) English author

Chatterton (London: Abacus, [1987] 1991), ch. 10, p. 151.

Secret, Reading, Childhood

“For that fine madness still he did retain
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”

Michael Drayton (1563–1631) English poet

To Henry Reynolds, of Poets and Poesy (1627).

Madness

“Tony the Beat Poet says the words alone, lonely and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language. I agree with Tony. Those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Hunger, Soul, Loneliness

“Here's one more from my limited experience with all 3 fields: A writer creates life; a poet creates magic from life; a philosopher tries to understand life.”

Siddharth Katragadda (1972) Indian writer

page 4
Dark Rooms (2002)

Life, Understanding

“Verse libertines' pioneered the work to get rid of obstacles between that which hampered the poet and separated him from his audience, less a matter of rules and formulae, more a return of spirit.”

Harriet Monroe (1860–1936) American poet and editor

The New Poetry (1918)

“In the old romanticism the poem was an uncommon effect of common experience on the poet. All interest in the poem centred in this mysterious capacity of the poet for overfeeling, for being overaffected. In Poe the old romanticism ended and the new romanticism began. That is, the interest was broadened to include the reader: the end of the poem was pushed ahead a stage, from the poet to the reader. The uncommon effect of experience on the poet became merely incidental to the uncommon effect which he might have on the reader. Mystery was replaced by science; inspiration by psychology.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"What is a Poem?" from Anarchism Is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

Science

“Three things, according to poets, are considered bliss in Iceland: hot rye-cakes, plump girls, and cold buttermilk.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

Girl

“Tragedy springs from outrage; it protests at the conditions of life. It carries in it the possibilities of disorder, for all tragic poets have something of the rebelliousness of Antigone. Goethe, on the contrary, loathed disorder. He once said that he preferred injustice, signifying by that cruel assertion not his support for reactionary political ideals, but his conviction that injustice is temporary and reparable whereas disorder destroys the very possibilities of human progress. Again, this is an anti-tragic view; in tragedy it is the individual instance of injustice that infirms the general pretence of order. One Hamlet is enough to convict a state of rottenness.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. V (p. 167).

Life, Spring, Support

“In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs—in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Preface.
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

Law, Knowledge, Passion, Time

“"Leaves, some the wind scatters on the ground—So is the race of man." Leaves, also, are thy children; and leaves, too, are they who cry out so if they are worthy of credit, or bestow their praise, or on the contrary curse, or secretly blame and sneer; and leaves, in like manner, are those who shall receive and transmit a man's fame to after-times. For all such things as these "are produced in the season of spring," as the poet says; then the wind casts them down; then the forest produces other leaves in their places. But a brief existence is common to all things, and yet thou avoidest and pursuest all things as if they would be eternal.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

X, 34
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X

Children, Spring, Time, Cry

“My uncle [mother’s brother] wrote rather twee books of memoirs in the period between the two World Wars. They’d be deeply embarrassing to read today. In the 19th century my mother’s family were involved with the Pre-Raphaelites, and a direct ancestor of mine was Lady Byron’s lawyer, who advised her to leave the poet because of her husband’s affair with his half-sister. A much earlier ancestor on my mother’s side was chaplain to Richard Corbet, Bishop of Oxford, who wrote the poem ‘Farewell Rewards and Fairies’. In his ‘Brief Lives’ Aubrey describes them getting drunk together in the cellars of Christchurch, Oxford.”

Edward Lucie-Smith (1933) British art critic, writer and curator

From an interview http://rimbaud.org.uk/q-lucie-smith.html

War, Books, World, Family

“Jobs: Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields. We all brought to this a sort of “liberal arts” air, an attitude that we wanted to pull the best that we saw into this field. You don’t get that if you are very narrow.
Cringley: How does the Web affect the economy?
Jobs: We live in an information economy. The problem is that information's usually impossible to get, at least in the right place, at the right time. The reason Federal Express won over its competitors was its package-tracking system. For the company to bring that package-tracking system onto the Web is phenomenal. I use it all the time to track my packages. It's incredibly great. Incredibly reassuring. And getting that information out of most companies is usually impossible.
But it's also incredibly difficult to give information. Take auto dealerships. So much money is spent on inventory—billions and billions of dollars. Inventory is not a good thing. Inventory ties up a ton of cash, it's open to vandalism, it becomes obsolete. It takes a tremendous amount of time to manage. And, usually, the car you want, in the color you want, isn't there anyway, so they've got to horse-trade around. Wouldn't it be nice to get rid of all that inventory? Just have one white car to drive and maybe a laserdisc so you can look at the other colors. Then you order your car and you get it in a week.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

Robert X. Cringley for a Public Broadcasting System [PBS] television series, “Triumph of the Nerds” (1995), “The Lost Interview: Steve Jobs Tells Us What Really Matters” https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/17/the-lost-interview-steve-jobs-tells-us-what-really-matters/#5cb0fc8e6c3a, Forbes, Steve Denning, Nov 17, 2011, 1990s

Money, People, World, Art

“For five hundred years after Walther's death – until Goethe – no German lyric poet was his equal.”

Walther von der Vogelweide (1170–1230) Middle High German lyric poet

Frederick Goldin German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages (New York: Anchor, 1973) p. 101.
Praise

Death

“The late Mr. [Carl] Sandburg was a public performer of the first rank ("Ker-oh-seen!" he crooned in one of the first TV pitches for the jet-engine — ole banjo on his knee, white hair mussed by the jet-stream), a poet of the second rank (who can ever forget that feline-footed fog?) and a biographer of awesome badness.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

"First Note on Abraham Lincoln"
1990s, United States - Essays 1952-1992 (1992)

Forgetting

“That noble-minded poet alone merits praise whose word, like the sentence of a judge, keeps free from love or hatred in recording the past.”

Kalhana

Quoted from Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage

Love, Past

“Since 1914…I wait for the natural to return; for newspapers to report news with care for accuracy and grammar; for schools to teach and for pupils to study; for faces to be sane and intelligent, and even humorous; for American artists and poets and writers to be exuberant and optimistic…it is all gone with the music of Vienna and the gaiety of San Francisco. But I still see everything against that background, and really I see nothing funny anywhere. The Beatnik beard and the mini skirt and the topless waitress, they ARE funny, I know they are funny but they only make me tired, I don't laugh.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

letter to Roger MacBride (March 5, 1968).
reflecting her impressions of the world of 1968, at the age of 81.

School, Music, Intelligence, Nature

“At present I'm re-reading Traherne's Centuries of Meditations which I think almost the most beautiful book (in prose, I mean, excluding poets) in English.”

Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) English poet

C. S. Lewis, letter to Arthur Greeves in December 1941. http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=978 Criticism

Books, Beauty, Thinking, Reading

“He came, and no man knew it; no man knew
The wondrous boon to Scotland given;
That there—beneath that grim and wintry blue—
A glorious Poet, strong and true,
Had newly dropp'd from heaven!”

John Stanyan Bigg (1828–1865) British writer

Ode to the Centenary of Burns http://www.gerald-massey.org.uk/massey/dmc_burns_centenary2.htm#7 (1858)

Strong

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Parnassus, Preface

Love, Education, Nature

“The most significant feature of our histories, however, is the religious zeal felt or exhibited by the swordsmen of Islam before and after the “infidels” who resisted “were sent to hell”, the Brahmans massacred or molested or expelled, idols desecrated, temples demolished, and mosques raised in their stead. The prophet of Islam appears in a dream and bids a sultãn to start on the “holy expedition”, leaving no doubt that the “victory of religion” was assured. Amîr Khusrû was very eloquent about the transformation that was taking place. When the hordes of Alãu’d-Dîn Khaljî sacked the temple of Somnath, he exulted, “The sword of Islãm purified the land as the Sun purifies the earth.” His enthusiasm broke all bounds when the same hordes swept over South India: “The tongue of the sword of the Khalifa of the time, which is the tongue of the flame of Islãm, has imparted light to the entire darkness of Hindustãn by the illumination of its guidance… and several capitals of the gods of the Hindus in which Satanism had prevailed since the time of Jinns, have been demolished. All these impurities of infidelity have been cleansed by the Sultãn’s destruction of idol-temples, beginning with his first expedition to Deogîr, so that the flames of the fight of the law illumine all these unholy countries… God be praised!” One wonders whether the poet of Islam is being honoured or slandered when he is presented in our own times as the pioneer of Secularism. Or, perhaps, Secularism in India has a meaning deeper than that we find in the dictionaries or dissertations on political science. We may not be much mistaken if, seeing its studied exercise in blackening everything Hindu and whitewashing everything Islamic, we suspect that this Secularism is nothing more than the good old doctrine of Islam in disguise.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

God, Religion, Law, Dreams

“[Rhyme is] but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter; … Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme, … as have also long since our best English tragedies, as… trivial and of no true musical delight; which [truly] consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Introduction to Paradise Lost Added, 1668

Age, Music, Sense, Learning

“Individualism, isolation, alienation. The poet is not only different from society, he is as different as possible from other poets; all this differentness is exploited to the limit—is used as subject matter, even. Each poet develops an elaborate, “personalized”, bureaucratized machinery of effect; refine your singularities is everybody’s maxim.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

of modernism; “The End of the Line”, p. 81
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Personality

“Emerson writes in his Journal that all men try their hands at poetry, but few know which their poems are. The poets are not those who write poems, but those who know which of the things they write are poems.”

Carl Andre (1935) American artist

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

Men

“Music, for me, is a love bewitched. / Fame as a painter? / Writer, modern poet? Bad joke. / So I have no calling, and loaf.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1899), # 67, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1895 - 1902

Love, Music