There are two classes of poets — the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.
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Parnassus, PrefaceRalph Waldo Emerson
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Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
Thomas Stearns (T. S.) Eliot
It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off. This last may be true, at any rate of poets: Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course — being also a novelist — am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?
Margaret Atwood
Forty years ago, when Dylan Thomas read, he spent half the program reciting other poets' work. Hardly a self-effacing man, he was nevertheless humble before his art. Today most readings are celebrations less of poetry than of the author's ego. No wonder the audience for such events usually consists entirely of poets, would-be poets, and friends of the author.
Dana Gioia
The poets are wrong of course. … But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.
William Faulkner
Love is not the sacred thing that poets talk about … Love is an illusion; it is the world's greatest mistake. I ought to know for I've been loved as no other woman of my time has been loved. Men have threatened suicide, they have taken poison, they have fought duels for me. All kinds have come to me — [[geniuses], poets, millionaires, artists, musicians — but now there is not one to whom I have appealed for the loan of ?25 who have responded.
There is love for you!Isadora Duncan
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Emin, Tracey
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