97 Quotes Tagged: poets

"the gods are created by poets" — Ovid

Wantons we are, and though our words be such
Our lives do differ from our lines by much.

Each young person is a poet of sorts, trying to sort out the poetics of their inner life and its relation to the great world around it. Each elder is a philosopher of sorts, trying to sort out the meanings and gleanings of a life as well as the necessary implications of the presence of death.

This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.

I act as the tongue of you,
... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened.

That is why they have poets — to classify all the degrees of love. It is for scientists to classify the maladies arising from the want of it.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn — that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness — that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

Between roars the lion purrs.

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.

"The little poets sing of little things:
Hope, cheer, and faith, small queens and puppet kings;
Lovers who kissed and then were made as one,
And modest flowers waving in the sun.

The mighty poets write in blood and tears
And agony that, flame-like, bites and sears.
They reach their mad blind hands into the night,
To plumb abysses dead to human sight;
To drag from gulfs where lunacy lies curled,
Mad, monstrous nightmare shapes to blast the world.


MUSINGS


[click on the thumbnail by Jack "King" Kirby]"

Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives.