#poets

To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #grimace #impersonal #impossible #light

One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it. ↗

— Robert Hass

#nature

...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal? ↗

— H.D.

#doolittle #h-d #hilda #modernism #poetry

... While much recent historicist criticism has assumed early nineteenth-century readers attuned to subtle ideological nuances in poetry, actual responses from readers often come closer to clulessness. ... It is no surprise that no one understood Blake, but other poets fared not much better. ... Coleridge's 'Christabel' was 'the standing enigma which puzzles the curiosity of literary circles. What is it all about?', while another reviewer asked about Shelley, 'What, in the name of wonder on one side, and of common sense on the other, is the meaning of this metaphysical rhapsody about the unbinding of Prometheus?'. Even Keats was condemned for 'his frequent obscurity and confusion of language' and his 'unintelligible quaintness'. Byron, never to be outdone, boasted in 'Don Juan' that not only did he not understand many of his fellow poets, he did not understand himself either: 'I don't pretend that I quite understand / My own meaning when I would be very fine.' ... ↗

— Andrew Elfenbein

#incomprehensible #poetry #romantic-poets #romantic

The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember. ↗

— David Antin

#always #ancient #anxiety #began #deficiencies

Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance. ↗

— Jean Anouilh

#give #importance #inspiration #invented #poets

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one. ↗

— Hannah Arendt

#entitles #experience #indispensable #love #love is

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully. ↗

— Aristotle

#chiefly #homer #lies #other #poets

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. ↗

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

#legislators #poets #world

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible. ↗

— T. S. Eliot

#important thing #little #most #poets #possible