A Poet S Own Truth Quotes & Sayings

A poet is a blind optimist.
The world is against him for
many reasons. But the
poet persists. He believes
that he is on the right track,
no matter what any of his
fellow men say. In his
eternal search for truth, the
poet is alone.
He tries to be timeless in a
society built on time. — Jack Kerouac

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist. — Neil Gaiman

This is truth the poet sings ... — John Greenleaf Whittier

Poetry examines an emotional truth. It's an experience filtered through the personality of the poet. We look to poetry for visions, not scientific truths. The poet's job is to combine new elements. Explore their melting, seeping into one another. — Diane Glancy

The Black homosexual is hard pressed to gain audience among his heterosexual brothers; even if he is more talented, he is inhibited by his silence or his admissions. This is what the race has depended on in being able to erase homosexuality from our recorded history. The "chosen" history. But the sacred constructions of silence are futile exercises in denial. We will not go away with our issues of sexuality. We are coming home. It is not enough to tell us that one was a brilliant poet, scientist, educator, or rebel. Whom did he love? It makes a difference. I can't become a whole man simply on what is fed to me: watered-down versions of Black life in America. I need the ass-splitting truth to be told, so I will have something pure to emulate, a reason to remain loyal. — Essex Hemphill

Poetry is the whispering of a truth by the shouting of the best possible lies — Oscar Sparrow

An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad truth,
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,
And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A poet must discover that it's his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed. — Jim Harrison

You're confusing desire and love,' she said, watching him. 'They are not the same.'
'I do love you. I feel near to murder at the idea of you marrying another man, and that's the truth of the matter.'
'Desire is bloody, perjured, full of blame.'
Ewan walked up the steps to her. 'Is that poetry?'
'Yes.'
'I don't like the sound of it. There's something nasty about that poet.'
'It's Shakespeare,' Annabel said.
Ewan obviously dismissed Shakespeare as a lost cause. 'We would be happy together,' he said. — Eloisa James

The violinist must possess the poet's gift of piercing the protective hide which grows on propagandists, stockbrokers and slave traders, to penetrate the deeper truth which lies within. — Yehudi Menuhin

Closed eyes cannot see light — Andrea L'Artiste

GOOD GERMANS

You took me to your family
You warned me well before
That your father is a fascist
And your mother is a whore

I was kind of disappointed
I was bored to elll the truth:
Your folks they're just Good Germans
but you, you're Hitler Youth

So I'm going to live in China
Where you get a better deal
Where your killer is a poet
And your comrade is a girl

-1973 — Leonard Cohen

In truth, I'm still slightly embarrassed to say, I am a poet. I'd rather say, I make poems. — Henri Cole

There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, 'Truth is the daughter of Time.' — Abraham Lincoln

I've read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they're all do-lally and they're all different. There's Gerard Manly Hopkins in his black Jesuit clothes lying face down on the ground to look at an individual bluebell, Robert Frost who never used a desk, was once caught short by a poem coming and wrote it on the sole of his shoe, T.S. Eliot in his I'm-not-a-Poet suit with his solid sensible available-for-poetry three hours a day, Ted Hughes folded into his tiny cubicle at the top of the stairs where there is no window, no sight or smell of earth or animal but the rain clatter on the roof bows him to the page, Pablo Neruda who grandly declared poetry should only ever be handwritten, and then added his own little bit of bonkers by saying: in green ink. Poets are their own nation. Most of them know. — Niall Williams

In fiction, the characters have their own lives. They may start as a gloss on the author's life, but they move on from there. In poetry, especially confessional poetry but in other poetry as well, the poet is not writing characters so much as emotional truth wrapped in metaphor. Bam! Pow! A shot to the gut. — Jane Yolen

Poetry is an art of telling the poet's own truth my bending and twisting it with his or her own emotional bulldozer. — Debasish Mridha

For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire,
Show'd me the high, white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:
What dost thou in this living tomb? — Matthew Arnold

Archibald MacLeish affirmed that 'A poem should be equal to / not true'. As a defiant statement of poetry's gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a retuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive, like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it. — Seamus Heaney

The poets and philosophers I once loved had it wrong. Death does not come to us all, nor does the passage of time dim our memories and reduce our bodies to dust. Because while I was considered dead, and a headstone had been engraved with my name, in truth my life was just beginning. — Kevin Williamson

It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

There lived a poet in the lands of gold,
Wrote along poems unaffected by warmth or cold,
His words spoke truth and pen's stroke was bold,
His only motive: lives to mould — Adhish Mazumder

Poetry is a kind of lying, necessarily. To profit the poet or beauty. But also in that truth may be told only so. Those who, admirably, refuse to falsify (as those who will not risk pretensions) are excluded from saying even so much. Degas said he didn't paint what he saw, but what would enable them to see the thing he had. — Jack Gilbert

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry. — Laura Riding

Every mother should be a true artist, who knows how to weave into her child's life images of grace and beauty, the true poet capable of writing on the soul of childhood the harmony of love and truth, and teaching it how to produce the grandest of all poems - the poetry of a true and noble life. — Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

In truth, every creation of the mind is first of all 'poetic' in the proper sense of the word; and inasmuch as there exists an equivalence between the modes of sensibility and intellect, it is the same function that is exercised initially in the enterprises of the poet and the scientist. — Saint-John Perse

So you have found me and would know the tale. When a poet speaks of truth to another poet, waht hope has truth? Let me ask this, then. DOes one find memory in invention? Or will you find invention in memory? Wich bows in servitude befor the other? Will the measure of greatness be weighed solely in details? Perhaps so, if details make up the full weft of the world, if themes are nothing more than the coomposite of lists perfectly ordered and unerring rendered; and if I should kneel before invention, as if it were memory made perfect. — Steven Erikson

Superior poets say what they really feel. Mediocre poets say what they decide to feel. Inferior poets say what they think they should feel. — Alvaro De Campos

I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted. — Colum McCann

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

2. After God notices the truth about us (voiced by the poet), God responds to that truth. The poem of Jeremiah 5 continues with a presentation of God's response. The taxonomy of guilt and healing includes two dimensions of God's response to the reality of sin and guilt. First there is God's wrath, indignation, and anger. — Walter Brueggemann

Never ask a poet to tell you the truth. We have ten different ways to describe a drink of water, and each is true and all lie. — Max Gladstone

The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The poet ... is the man of metaphor: while the philosopher is interested only in the truth of meaning, beyond even signs and names, and the sophist manipulates empty signs ... the poet plays on the multiplicity of signifieds. — Jacques Derrida

My stupidity gave its blessing to succouring nature, on her knees before God.
What I am (my drunken laughter and happiness) is nonetheless at stake, handed over to chance, thrown out into the night, chased away like a dog.
The wind of truth responded like a slap to piety's extended cheek.
The heart is human to the extent that it rebels (this means: to be a man is 'not to bow down before the law').
A poet doesn't justify - he doesn't accept - nature completely. True poetry is outside laws. But poetry ultimately accepts poetry.
When to accept poetry changes it into its opposite (it becomes the mediator of an acceptance!) I hold back the leap in which I would exceed the universe, I justify the given world, I content myself with it — Georges Bataille

On the whole, however, the conclusions I have drawn from the proofs quoted may, I believe, safely be relied on. Assuredly they will not be disturbed either by the lays of a poet displaying the exaggeration of his craft, or by the compositions of the chroniclers that are attractive at truth's expense; the subjects they treat of being out of the reach of evidence, and time having robbed most of them of historical value by enthroning them in the region of legend. — Thucydides

I think the poet is the last person who is still speaking the truth when no one else dares to. I think the poet is the first person to begin the shaping and visioning of the new forms and the new consciousness when no one else has begun to sense it; I think these are two of the most essential human functions. — Diane Di Prima

[It is not] the poet's business to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth. — George Oppen

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet. — Huston Smith

The artist's transcendence is achieved through success at diagnosing and naming the maladies of the age. Artists tell a different sort of truth than scientists do. The truth of the scientist is a generalizing truth, while the artist or writer's is a particular truth. It is the truth about particular persons in particular situations. The poet or the novelist reveals truths about human lives by embodying these truths in concrete characters, in specific situations. Readers recognize their own reality in the work. We find ourselves saying, as we read, 'Yes! This is how it is for me.' Both those who enjoy the work of artists and the artists themselves achieve transcendence through this identification of the particular truths about selves in the world. — David LaRocca

Some days I don't know what is greater.
My wisdom, or my stupidity. — Sanober Khan

There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth. — Jean Giraudoux