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Poet Quotes by Wystan Hugh Auden
- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
- It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can…
- A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
- A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
- No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and…
- Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
- All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is therefore not at all a desirable quality in a…
- The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets…
- A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to…
- The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: "For God's sake…
- By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
- As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.
- Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse…
- A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
- Poetry makes nothing happen.
- Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.
- Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The…
- A writer, or at least a poet, is always being asked by people who should know better: “Whom do you write for?” The question is,…
- I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" -…
- In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet…
- A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.
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