Quotes
Quotes about Poets
The poets had always had words ready for the end of the world
The productions of all arts are kinds of poetry and their craftsmen are all poets.
To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose, - words in their best order; poetry, - the best words in their best order.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Like hungry guests, a sitting audience looks; Plays are like suppers; poets are the cooks. The founder's you: the table is the place: The carvers we: the prologue is the grace. Each act, a course, each scene, a different dish, Though we're in Lent, I doubt you're still for flesh. Satire's the sauce, high-season'd, sharp and rough. Kind masks and beaux, I hope you're pepperproof? Wit is the wine; but 'tis so scarce the true Poets, like vintners, balderdash and brew. Your surly scenes, where rant and bloodshed join. Are butcher's meat, a battle's sirloin: Your scenes of love, so flowing, soft and chaste, Are water-gruel without salt or taste.
Painters and poets have equal license in regard to everything. [Lat., Pictoribus atque poetis Quidlibet audendi semper fuit aequa potestas.]
Have you not heard the poets tell How came the dainty Baby Bell Into this world of ours?
Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.
Hark, how chimes the passing bell! There's no music to a knell; All the other sounds we hear, Flatter, and but cheat our ear. This doth put us still in mind That our flesh must be resigned, And, a general silence made, The world be muffled in a shade. [Orpheus' lute, as poets tell, Was but moral of this bell, And the captive soul was she, Which they called Eurydice, Rescued by our holy groan, A loud echo to this tone.]
Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret room Piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning's dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books! At last, because the time was ripe, I chanced upon the poets.
When buttercups are blossoming, The poets sand, 'tis best to wed: So all for love we paired in Spring-- Blanche and I--ere youth had sped.
Feast of John and Charles Wesley, Priests, Poets, Teachers, 1791 & 1788 Matthew xi. 27. JESUS, the infinite I AM, With God essentially the same, With him enthroned above all height, As God of God, and Light of Light, Thou art by thy great Father known, From all eternity his Son. Thou only dost the Father know, And wilt to all thy followers show, Who cannot doubt thy gracious will His glorious Godhead to reveal; Reveal him now, if thou art he, And live, eternal Life, in me.
Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could: they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.
For poets (bear the word) Half-poets even, are still whole democrats.
Oft morning dreams presage approaching fate, For morning dreams, as poets tell, are true.
Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; morals, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long knownâthat the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold. -Zelda Fitzgerald.
Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
Souls of poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.
The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body.
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known--that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.
