What A Poet Is Quotes

A Poet = A willingness to be vulnerable & to trust the inner voice. ~ Morgan Dragonwillow

Loving my Poet as I do, though, I try hard to understand what a poet is. The first clue lies in the fact that my Poet - every poet - is an insomniac. My own reads or wanders about our apartment for the best part of most nights. She told me she often feels she would give up every poem she's ever written for one good night's sleep. ~ Naeem Murr

For not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us. ~ Plato

For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature. ~ Octavio Paz

Tea is a work of art and needs a master hand to bring out its noblest qualities. We have good and bad tea, as we have good and bad paintings - generally the latter. There is no single recipe for making the perfect tea, as there are no rules for producing a Titian or a Sesson. Each preparation of the leaves has its individuality, its special affinity with water and heat, its own method of telling a story. The truly beautiful must always be in it. How much do we not suffer through the constant failure of society to recognise this simple and fundamental law of art and life; Lichilai, a Sung poet, has sadly remarked that there were three most deplorable things in the world: the spoiling of fine youths through false education, the degradation of fine art through vulgar admiration, and the utter waste of fine tea through incompetent manipulation. ~ Okakura Kakuzo

The essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal; it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory. ~ T. S. Eliot

Eliot's understanding of poetic epistemology is a version of Bradley's theory, outlined in our second chapter, that knowing involves immediate, relational, and transcendent stages or levels. The poetic mind, like the ordinary mind, has at least two types of experience: The first consists largely of feeling (falling in love, smelling the cooking, hearing the noise of the typewriter), the second largely of thought (reading Spinoza). The first type of experience is sensuous, and it is also to a great extent monistic or immediate, for it does not require mediation through the mind; it exists before intellectual analysis, before the falling apart of experience into experiencer and experienced. The second type of experience, in contrast, is intellectual (to be known at all, it must be mediated through the mind) and sharply dualistic, in that it involves a breaking down of experience into subject and object. In the mind of the ordinary person, these two types of experience are and remain disparate. In the mind of the poet, these disparate experiences are somehow transcended and amalgamated into a new whole, a whole beyond and yet including subject and object, mind and matter. Eliot illustrates his explanation of poetic epistemology by saying that John Donne did not simply feel his feelings and think his thoughts; he felt his thoughts and thought his feelings. He was able to "feel his thought as immediately as the odour of a rose." Immediately" in this famous simile is a technical te ~ Jewel Spears Brooker

The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear. ~ Bryant H. McGill

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time - and whenever we do it, we're not poets. ~ E.E. Cummings

Natural emotion is the soul of poetry, as melody is of music; the same faults are engendered by over-study of either art; there is a lack of sincerity, of irresistible impulse in both the poet and the, composer. ~ Edmund Clarence Stedman

You took to the trenches and said: war is more beautiful,
you shall never see my feet again.
I will seek the roads and taverns,
I am the blind poet.
The frowning autumn gives music for colors –
sunset gives me the opulence of roses
and I ask about you. I ask about you
but as a stung man does after something has afflicted his blood.
Peace be . . .
– I do not want your reply. ~ Saadi Youssef

I mean, by such flightiness, something that feels unsatisfied at the center of my life - that makes me shaky, fickle, inquisitive, and hungry. I could call it a longing for home and not be far wrong. Or I could call it a longing for whatever supersedes, if it cannot pass through, understanding. Other words that come to mind: faith, grace, rest. In my outward appearance and life habits I hardly change - there's never been a day that my friends haven't been able to say, and at a distance, "There's Oliver, still standing around in the weeds. There she is, still scribbling in her notebook." But, at the center: I am shaking; I am flashing like tinsel. Restless. I read about ideas. Yet I let them remain ideas. I read about the poet who threw his books away, the better to come to a spiritual completion. Yet I keep my books. I flutter; I am attentive, maybe I even rise a little, balancing; then I fall back. ~ Mary Oliver

The child is father of the man ... .attributed to Sigmund Freud, but believed to have been coined by a well-known poet years before Freud's time ~ Shirl Solomon

Speaking as an outsider is the most authentic voice for a poet. Poets who have one hundred thousand or one million readers [as many South Korean poets do] might not be a real, authentic poet. ~ Kim Hyesoon

Time is, after all, the greatest of poets; and the sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs of Fame. ~ James Russell Lowell

There is no such thing as a dumb poet or a handless painter. The essence of an artist is that he should be articulate. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

I told her the clitoris is like a Bonsai tree that needs constant tending and the g-spot is an unexplored island waiting to have a flag pinned on its peak. She laughed and said I should be a poet. Then we went to bed and crossed the sheets as if it were a new continent we had just discovered. ~ Chloe Thurlow

The poet, while creating anew, is likely to be in a sense restoring something old. ~ Owen Barfield

He would tell stories about the Holy City, about Solomon, a just king, a poet-king, a monarch with a thousand concubines. We weren't quite sure what concubines were, but we guessed: a concubine ... Concubines! One thousand! One thousand women in all colours and shapes - but all of them sexy, of course - one thousand - one thousand raving beauties lying side by side on a bed (what a bed! How wide it must have been!), all of them smiling, all of them reaching out their arms, all of them saying something in Hebrew - but the meaning was unmistakeable - "Come here, sweety." One thousand women. If one were to spend twenty, or fifteen minutes with each one of them, how long would it take to ... ? A problem that our math teacher never assigned us for homework ... ! ~ Moacyr Scliar

A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so. ~ Eyvind Johnson

Neither black/red/yellow nor woman but poet or writer. For many of us, the question of priorities remains a crucial issue. Being merely "a writer" without a doubt ensures one a status of far greater weight than being "a woman of color who writes" ever does. Imputing race or sex to the creative act has long been a means by which the literary establishment cheapens and discredits the achievements of non-mainstream women writers. She who "happens to be" a (non-white) Third World member, a woman, and a writer is bound to go through the ordeal of exposing her work to the abuse and praises and criticisms that either ignore, dispense with, or overemphasize her racial and sexual attributes. Yet the time has passed when she can confidently identify herself with a profession or artistic vocation without questioning and relating it to her color-woman condition. ~ Trinh T. Minh-ha

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane. ~ Billy Collins

Unforgettable
Poets should not be loyal to poets,
but to poems.
Even less enamored of the poem
than of the line.
Pledge their fealty not as much to a line
as to its original image,
For it is that indelible image
makes the line,
which makes poem,
which makes the poet
unforgettable. ~ Beryl Dov

Our emotions are ever-changing and infinitely varied, but the words with which we describe them are fixed and rigid. Our life is like quicksilver, our vocabulary like steel. Sometimes a consummate poet succeeds in rendering the quality of life in words. For the rest of us, this is not possible. ~ Laura Huxley

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

Revolution is a bitter thing, mixed with filth and blood, not as lovely or perfect as the poets think. It is eminently down to earth, involving many humble, tiresome tasks, not so romantic as the poets think ... So it is easy for all who have romantic dreams about revolution to become disillusioned on closer acquaintance, when a revolution is actually carried out. ~ Lu Xun

The power of painter or poet to describe what he calls an ideal thing depends upon its being to him not an ideal but a real thing. No man ever did or ever will work well but either from actual sight or sight of faith. ~ John Ruskin

There is no true poetry without conscious craft, absorbed attention, absolute concentration. There is no true poetry without unconscious invention. The reader, too, enters into the relationship between the controlled and the uncontrollable aspects of the art. Shelley says that 'Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.' The poem is a genie that comes out of the bottle to liberate the reader's imagination, the divinity within. The writer and the reader make meaning together. The poet who calls on help from the heavenly muse also does so on behalf of the imaginative reader. ~ Edward Hirsch

Think of my Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world - there I am a child - there they do not know me not even my most intimate acquaintance - I give into their feelings as though I were refraining from irritating a little child - Some think me middling, others silly, other foolish - every one thinks he sees my weak side against my will; when in thruth it is with my will - I am content to be thought all this because I have in my own breast so graet a resource. This is one great reason why they like me so; because they can all show to advantage in a room, and eclipese from a certain tact one who is reckoned to be a good Poet - I hope I am not here playing tricks 'to make the angels weep': I think not: for I have not the least contempt for my species; and though it may sound paradoxical: my greatest elevations of Soul leave me every time more humbled - Enough of this - though in your Love for me you will not think it enough. ~ John Keats

…in the twentieth century
grief lasts at most a year.'

I have used this quote from the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet as a prelude to a small tale before I go on to the War in iraq. The reason I chose to use this quote is because I wonder how long grief lasts in the twenty-first century. Is it now a month? Two weeks? Or just enough time for the television cameras to record it and then it's over? I don't know. ~ Saeed Akhtar Mirza

I saw a poet chase a butterfly in a meadow. He put his net on a bench where a boy sat reading a book. It's a misfortune that it is usually the other way round. ~ Karl Kraus

Ultimately you're trying to reach across and find some other person, some other human warmth. But it is, especially in written poetry, it is inscribed in a text and the text can't do that work by itself and you as a poet can only do your best. ~ Edward Hirsch

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

Yet it is the Outsider's belief that life aims at more life, at higher forms of life, something for which the Superman is an inexact poetic symbol (as Dante's description of the beatific vision is expressed in terms of a poetic symbol); so that, in a sense, Urizen is the most important of the three functions. The fall was necessary, as Hesse realized. Urizen must go forward alone.
The other two must follow him. And as soon as Urizen has gone forward, the Fall has taken place. Evolution towards God is impossible without a Fall. And it is only by this recognition that the poet can ever come to 'praise in spite of; for if evil is ultimately discord, unresolvable, then the idea of dennoch preisen is a self-contradiction. And yet it must be clearly recognized and underlined that this is not the Hegelian 'God's in his heaven, all's right with the world'. Even if the evil is necessary, it remains evil, discord, pain. It remains an Existential fact, not something that proves to be
something else when you hold it in the right light. It is as if there were two opposing armies:
the Hegelian view holds that peace can be secured by proving that there is really no ground for
opposition; in short, they are really friends. The Blakeian view says that the discord is necessary,
but it can never be resolved until one army has. completely exterminated the other. This is the
Existential view, first expressed by Soren Kierkegaard, the Outsider's view and, incide ~ Colin Wilson

Reading a poem in translation," wrote Bialek, "is like kissing a woman through a veil"; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications. ~ Anne Michaels

Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor ... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion. ~ R.S. Thomas

The Indians are the Italians of Asia", Didier pronounced with a sage and mischievous grin. "It can be said, certainly, with equal justice, that the Italians are the Indians of Europe, but you do understand me, I think. There is so much Italian in the Indians, and so much Indians in the Italians. They are both people of the Madonna - they demand a goddess, even if the religion does not provide one. Every man in both countries is a singer when he is happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner. For them, food is music inside the body, and music is food inside the heart. The Language of India and the language of Italy, they make every man a poet, and make something beautiful from every banalite. They are nations where love - amore, pyaar - makes a cavalier of a Borsalino on a street corner, and makes a princess of a peasant girl, if only for the second that her eyes meet yours. ~ Gregory David Roberts

It is not unusual to hear a religious leader, a philosopher, or a poet refer to man as having a divine spark within him. Such characterizations infer that man possesses great abilities and potentials. We are frequently admonished to develop our capabilities, reach out, and set high goals for ourselves. ~ Ezra Taft Benson