As Blake said, there is no competition between true poets.
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“John Ransom’s Poetry”, p. 98Randall Jarrell
» Randall Jarrell - all quotes »
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
I wrote Fearful Symmetry during the Second World War, and hideous as the time was, it provided some parallels with Blake's time which were useful for understanding Blake's attitude to the world. Today, now that reactionary and radical forces alike are once more in the grip of the nihilistic psychosis that Blake described so powerful in Jerusalem, one of the most hopeful signs is the immensely increased sense of the urgency and immediacy of what Blake had to say.
Northrop Frye
Now I'm 'Blake Lewis' to the world, but I will always still be Bshorty from Bothell...I've never looked at it like a competition so I think I've won regardless. I won when I got to the top ten; I've already reached my goal.
Blake Lewis
The most important of the beat poets. He was a really true poet with an original voice, probably the most lyrical of those poets.
Nancy Peters
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
Jarrell, Randall
Jarry, Alfred
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