And poets by their sufferings grow,—
As if there were no more to do,
To make a poet excellent,
But only want and discontent.
--
Fragments, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).Samuel(poetButler
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In social terms the identification of poet with teacher is now complete. The first question one poet now asks another upon being introduced is "Where do you teach?" The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It's just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform with institutional ones.
Dana Gioia
There have been many most excellent poets that never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets.
Philip Sidney
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
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
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
Butler, Samuel (poet, 1612-1680)
Butler, Smedley
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