A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm and arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back to his homeland.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
"For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."
"I was filled with longing for joyful permanent fixations, and insight, for play and a secular individualism, a spiritual life and some unnameable opportunity like a right I vaguely remembered and couldn't get purchase on. It was no good. It took me years and one mistake after another to realize this and even then I simply got washed out, put aside I didn't really learn a lesson. I know it's not so much the mistakes not the divisions, or cultural impediments, the threats and isolation techniques we run on each other it's the heart. My father went to his grave unchanged. So did Poe. And beautiful Anna Karenina. And Ovid. Consuela Concepcion, too, my piano teacher. They say in the end Mussolini was so terrified his mind seized and he couldn't speak. He sat there swelled-up and bug-eyed. This is not it. Or anyone drowning or lurching from the fire shrieking he didn't want this to happen. There is so much gibberish. And imprecision. No wonder we lock in. Like you, I get scared. I used to go to my friend's house, sink into the old sofa on his back porch and read all day. His family and the ducks and dogs would pass by, let me be—discreet love—I'd feel safe."
Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.
Silence is the great teacher, and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it. There is no substitute for the creative inspiration, knowledge, and stability that come from knowing how to contact your core of inner silence. The great Sufi poet Rumi wrote, ''Only let the moving waters calm down, and the sun and moon will be reflected on the surface of your being.
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree' - probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.
The light that never was, on sea or land; The consecration, and the Poet's dream.
Blessings be with them, and eternal praise, Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares!- The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays.
And mighty poets in their misery dead.
I wander'd lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the Milky Way, They stretch'd in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay; Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazed-and gazed-but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills; And dances with the daffodils.
I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride; Of him who walked in glory and in joy, Following his plough, along the mountain-side. By our own spirits we are deified; We Poets in our youth begin in gladness, But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, 'This poet lies; Such heavenly touches ne'er touch'd earthly faces.'
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, That if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of the past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man; it can be one of the props, the pillars, to help him endure and prevail. See Poets & Writers
It is his [the poet's, the writer's] privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. See Poets & Writers
He [the writer] must, teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and compassion and sacrifice. See Poets & Writers
He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. See other 'Poets & Writers'
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. WILLIAM FAULKNER, address upon receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, Stockholm, Sweden, December 10, 1950. - Faulkner, Essays, Speeches & Public Letters, p. 120 (1951). This text is from Faulkner's original typescript; it was slightly revised from that which he delivered in Stockholm, and which was published in American newspapers at the time (p. 121).
There is a pleasure in poetic pains. Which only poets know.
Turn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but a poet; for a poet is worse, more servile, timorous and fawning than any I have named.
It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind.
We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936
see T. S. Eliot, 'Yeats the Poet' and W. H. Auden, 'Yeats the Poet'
