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Poet Quotes by James Fenton
- Babies are not brought by storks and poets are not produced by workshops.
- For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The…
- Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.
- I've not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in…
- 'Love' is so short of perfect rhymes that convention allows half-rhymes like 'move.' The alternative is a plague of doves, or a kind of poem…
- Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to…
- Some of my educated Filipino friends were aspiring poets, but their aspirations were all in the direction of the United States. They had no desire…
- There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing…
- Working alone on a poem, a poet is of all artists the most free. The poem can be written with a modicum of technology, and…
- What I want, when I write a poem, is no more than this: that it be preserved in some published form so that, in principle,…
More Poet Quotes
- Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake… — Hannah Arendt
- It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully. — Aristotle
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets.… — Paul Auster
- But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me… — Chinua Achebe
- Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration… — Margaret Atwood
- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. — Wystan Hugh Auden
- It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art… — Wystan Hugh Auden
- A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb. — Wystan Hugh Auden
- A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects. — Wystan Hugh Auden
- No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only… — Wystan Hugh Auden
- Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy… — Wystan Hugh Auden