Liberia Poet Quotes

Education is liberation, knowledge is power. ~ Henry Johnson Jr

What is a living reality without experience? If there is anything about which we feel to be true, it is that the world we endure is authentic. We can see, touch and hear it. Our conscious existence of presence is an exhibition within the mind, but in many other occurrences, some of us rarely accept that we create our own realities. ~ Henry Johnson Jr

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie. ~ Jean Cocteau

I'm not trying to be a poet on Twitter; I'm trying to be aware of the fact that a very simple sentence, well written, can have a very moving effect without that person knowing why. There's a deep genetic part of you that somehow, even without your permission, recognizes good language when it arrives. ~ Teju Cole

All I ask the haters
and I, too, am one
is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies), it might come to resemble love. ~ Ben Lerner

The business of the poet, said Imlac, is to examine, not the individual, but the species. ~ Samuel Johnson

In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others. ~ Stephen Burt

It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician. ~ Karl Weierstrass

There are some people who cannot help giving. Why? Because they experience a real psychological pleasure in doing so. They don't do it with an eye to their own advantage, they do it on the quiet; they detest doing it openly because that would take away some of the satisfaction. They do it in secret, with quick trembling hands, their breasts rocked by a spiritual well being which they do not themselves understand. ~ Knut Hamsun

Have you ever wondered
What happens to all the
poems people write?
The poems they never
let anyone else read?
Perhaps they are
Too private and personal

Perhaps they are just not good enough.

Perhaps the prospect
of such a heartfelt
expression being seen as
clumsy
shallow silly
pretentious saccharine
unoriginal sentimental
trite boring
overwrought obscure stupid
pointless
or
simply embarrassing

is enough to give any aspiring
poet good reason to
hide their work from
public view.

forever.

Naturally many poems are IMMEDIATELY DESTROYED.
Burnt shredded flushed away
Occasionally they are folded
Into little squares
And wedged under the corner of
An unstable piece of furniture
(So actually quite useful)

Others are
hidden behind
a loose brick
or drainpipe
or
sealed into
the back of an
old alarm clock
or
put between the pages of
AN OBSCURE BOOK
that is unlikely
to ever be opened.

someone might find them one day,
BUT PROBABLY NOT
The truth is that unread poetry
Will almost always be just that.
DOOMED
to join a vast invisible river
of waste that flows out of suburbia.

well
Almost always.

On rare occasions,
Some especially insistent
piec ~ Shaun Tan

He wanted to know if the master sergeant had read Auden, the twentieth century's most influential Christian poet, "English majors in the army, not many of them, not many of us, am I right, Top." Burnette, nonplussed, wondered if he should mention Eliot or the eccentric religious impulses of JD Salinger, but instead mumbled the only line he could recall from Auden's work, "We must love one another or die." Bingo, said the colonel. Son of a bitch had the wrong conjunction. ~ Bob Shacochis

In The End The Words Are The All And The Nothing. ~ R.M. Engelhardt

I've read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they're all do-lally and they're all different. There's Gerard Manly Hopkins in his black Jesuit clothes lying face down on the ground to look at an individual bluebell, Robert Frost who never used a desk, was once caught short by a poem coming and wrote it on the sole of his shoe, T.S. Eliot in his I'm-not-a-Poet suit with his solid sensible available-for-poetry three hours a day, Ted Hughes folded into his tiny cubicle at the top of the stairs where there is no window, no sight or smell of earth or animal but the rain clatter on the roof bows him to the page, Pablo Neruda who grandly declared poetry should only ever be handwritten, and then added his own little bit of bonkers by saying: in green ink. Poets are their own nation. Most of them know. ~ Niall Williams

I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet. ~ John Quincy Adams

Goethe, the great poet-philosopher, once wrote: "I find more and more that it is well to be on the side of the minority, since it is always the more intelligent. ~ Humphrey Bancroft Neill

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction. ~ Jesmyn Ward

The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes. ~ George Eliot

Ausonius must be read to be believed! As poet, no subject is too trivial for him; as courtier, no flattery too excessive. ~ Decimius Magnus Ausonius

Tolkien, lucky man, had protected a realm of his own invention to which he could flee. Robert Graves, embittered by battle, writes: The child alone a poet is: Spring and Fairyland are his… Wisdom made him old and wary banishing his Lords of Faery ~ Philip Zaleski

That's a poet.'
'I thought you said it was a bo-at.'
'Stupid pet! Don't you know what a poet it?'
'Why, a thing to sail on the water in.'
'Well, perhaps you're not so far wrong. Some poets do carry people over the sea ... '
...
'A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it too. ~ George MacDonald

If to a poet a physicist may speak
Freely, as though we shared a common tongue,
For "peace in our time" I should hardly seek
By means that once proved wrong.
It seems the Muscovite
Has quite a healthy, growing appetite.
We can't be safe; at least we can be right.
Some bombs may help - perhaps a bomb-proof cellar,
But surely not the Chamberlain umbrella.
The atom is now big; the world is small.
Unfortunately, we have conquered space.
If war does come, it comes to all,
To every distant place.
Will people have the dash
That Britons had when their world seemed to crash
Before a small man with a small mustache?
You rhyme the atoms to amuse and charm us -
Your counsel should inspire, and not disarm us.

(Teller's reply to an anonymous British man's poem/message (that Americans are too belligerent), both in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists). ~ Edward Teller

I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read. ~ Nell Freudenberger

Nexus
I wrote stubbornly into the evening.
At the window, a giant praying mantis
rubbed his monkey wrench head against the glass,
begging vacantly with pale eyes;
and the commas leapt at me like worms
or miniature scythes blackened with age.
the praying mantis screeched louder,
his ragged jaws opening into formlessness.
I walked outside;
the grass hissed at my heels.
Up ahead in the lapping darkness
he wobbled, magnified and absurdly green,
a brontosaurus, a poet. ~ Rita Dove

Remember that good poets too can write bad poems! Talent has also a talent to be untalented! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Virginia was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her lessons in algebra. Je m'imagine cela. They spent their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla. "Monsieur Poe-poe," as that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert's classes in Paris called the poet-poet. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I crave for knowledge. I envy tolerant, peaceful folks. I am frightened by ignorance. I loathe violence. ~ Tsegaye Gebre Medhin

The eye of the poet sees less clearly, but sees farther than the eye of the scientist. ~ Peter Kreeft

The Persian poet Rumi says, The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

When you become vulnerable, any ideal or perfect image of yourself falls away. (...)

Many people are addicted to perfection, and in their pursuit of the ideal, they have no patience with vulnerability. (...)

Every poet would like to write the ideal poem. Though they never achieve this, sometimes it glimmers through their best work. Ironically, the very beyondness of the idea is often the touch of presence that renders the work luminous. The beauty of the ideal awakens a passion and urgency that brings out the best in the person and calls forth the dream of excellence.

The beauty of the true ideal is its hospitality towards woundedness, weakness, failure and fall-back. Yet so many people are infected with the virus of perfection. They cannot rest; they allow themselves no ease until they come close to the cleansed domain of perfection. This false notion of perfection does damage and puts their lives under great strain. It is a wonderful day in a life when one is finally able to stand before the long, deep mirror of one's own reflection and view oneself with appreciation, acceptance, and forgiveness. On that day one breaks through the falsity of images and expectations which have blinded one's spirit. One can only learn to see who one is when one learns to view oneself with the most intimate and forgiving compassion. ~ John O'Donohue

I'm not sure I had ever written a fan letter before to a poet I had not met, but that's what I did when I read two poems by Gregory Woods ... I admired them especially for their technical virtuosity, in that it was technique completely used, never for the sake of cleverness but as a component of feeling ... What an enviable talent Gregory Woods has ~ Thom Gunn

When a great war has cut off the young men of a nation it never can be told thereafter what losses of scholars, poets, thinkers and great designers the country and the world have suffered. ~ James Vila Blake

Therefore the whole apparatus of piety, Hindu and Moslem alike - the temple and mosque, idol and holy water, scriptures and priests - were denounced by this inconveniently clear-sighted poet as mere substitutes for reality; dead things intervening between the soul and its love - ~ Rabindranath Tagore

The Old Poets Of China
Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist. ~ Mary Oliver

For next to being a great poet is the power of understanding one. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There are no lungs like the ones that breathe poetry. ~ D. Antoinette Foy

I became an electrician after high school. But I always had this thing in me to write. But it was always a little shameful. To say you were a poet was saying you were kind of crazy, and I carried that around for a long time. I still kind of carry that. And I think it might be true, actually. ~ Nick Flynn

Good poets borrow, great poets steal ~ T. S. Eliot

[L]et us not overlook the further great fact, that not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but that science is itself poetic. The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion. ... On the contrary science opens up realms of poetry where to the unscientific all is a blank. Those engaged in scientific researches constantly show us that they realize not less vividly, but more vividly, than others, the poetry of their subjects. Whoever will dip into Hugh Miller's works on geology, or read Mr. Lewes's "Seaside Studies," will perceive that science excites poetry rather than extinguishes it. And whoever will contemplate the life of Goethe will see that the poet and the man of science can co-exist in equal activity. Is it not, indeed, an absurd and almost a sacrilegious belief that the more a man studies Nature the less he reveres it? Think you that a drop of water, which to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water, loses anything in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of lightning? Think you that what is carelessly looked upon by the uninitiated as a mere snow-flake, does not suggest higher associations to one who has seen through a microscope the wondrously varied and elegant forms of snow-crystals? Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who kno ~ Herbert Spencer

Tis a question whether adversity or prosperity makes the most poets. ~ George Farquhar

I had been up all night with my old friend Allen Ginsberg, the poet, and we had both slid into the abyss of whiskey madness and full-bore substance abuse. It was wonderful, ~ Hunter S. Thompson

The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his. ~ Robert Graves

For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history. ~ Derek Walcott

It is what the poets of Ireland used to be saying, that every brave man, good at fighting, and every man that could do great deeds and not be making much talk about them, was of the Sons of the Gael; and that every skilled man that had music and that did enchantments secretly, was of the Tuatha de Danaan. ~ Lady Gregory

brilliant and audacious as ever - a beat poet of paranoia. He ~ Jon Ronson

No poet or orator has ever existed who believed there was any better than himself. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Live for everything, or die for nothing ~ Nate Spears

I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry. ~ Edward Hirsch

Love, as the poet says, is like the spring. It grows on you and seduces you slowly and gently, but it holds tight like the roots of a tree. You don't know until you're ready to go that you can't move, that you would have to mutilate yourself in order to be free. That's the feeling. It doesn't last, at least it doesn't have to. But it holds on like a steel claw in your chest. Even if the tree dies, the roots cling to you. I've seen men and women give up everything for love that once was. ~ Walter Mosley

scent of his perfume filled the little room. He waved the poet to a chair as slaves came in bearing wine ~ Bruce MacBain