Task Of A Poet Quotes & Sayings

My own personal task is not simply that of poet and writer (still less commentator, pseudo-prophet); it is basically to praise God out of an inner center of silence, gratitude, and 'awareness.' This can be realized in a life that apparently accomplishes nothing. Without centering on accomplishment or nonaccomplishment, my task is simply the breathing of this gratitude from day to day, in simplicity, and for the rest turning my hand to whatever comes, work being part of praise, whether splitting logs or writing poems, or best of all simple notes. — Thomas Merton

I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original. — William Cowper

When the theater gates open, a mob pours inside, and it is the poet's task to turn it into an audience. — Franz Grillparzer

When people have a hard task to do - one which stretches them - they become less concerned with trivial matters. — Idries Shah

Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

[A photograph] is a part of the evidence. I'm not saying it's the truth - it's part of the evidence. — Jim Goldberg

Science is a capital or fund perpetually reinvested; it accumulates, rolls up, is carried forward by every new man. Every man of science has all the science before him to go upon, to set himself up in business with. What an enormous sum Darwin availed himself of and reinvested! Not so in literature; to every poet, to every artist, it is still the first day of creation, so far as the essentials of his task are concerned. Literature is not so much a fund to be reinvested as it is a crop to be ever new-grown. — John Burroughs

The painter puts brush to canvas, and the poet puts pen to paper. The poet has the easier task, for his pen does not alter his rhyme. — Robert Breault

The grace for each day is sufficient to accomplish a daily task. — Lailah Gifty Akita

If he's a poet, why's he in jail?" demanded a suspicious voice.
Madam Chairwoman shrugged velvet shoulders.
"Perhaps he writes free verse," she suggested cunningly.
A stir of approval answered her. Mice are all for people being free, so that they too can be freed form their eternal task of cheering prisoners--so that they can stay snug at home, nibbling the family cheese, instead of sleeping out in damp straw on a diet of stale bread. — Margery Sharp

Once the meaning of suffering had been revealed to us, we refused to minimize or alleviate the camp's tortures by ignoring them or harboring false illusions and entertaining artificial optimism. Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs. We had realized its hidden opportunities for achievement, the opportunities which caused the poet Rilke to write, "Wie viel ist aufzuleiden!" (How much suffering there is to get through!). — Viktor E. Frankl

I'm from the South, so I'm very old-fashioned and I'm not very computer savvy at all, but I'm getting it. I understand that, if you've got information and you want it out there, that is how you go about doing it. I get it. — Angie Harmon

Whatever I'm writing comes organically out of my life. — Ann Voskamp

I do not suppose that anyone not a poet can realize the agony of creating a poem. Every nerve, even every muscle, seems strained to the breaking point. The poem will not be denied; to refuse to write it would be a greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-fish when the task is done. — Amy Lowell

The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valery once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations. — Daniel Dennett

Heaven knows, we all make mistakes. That's life - and chess. — Woody Allen

The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems. — Stanley Kunitz

I know of no task so salutory to the poet who would, first of all, put himself in touch with the resident genius of his own land. — Carl Sandburg

Dante is the first Christian poet, the first one whose whole system of thought is colored by a pure Christian theology. But the poem comes nearer to us than this. It is there real history of a brother man, of a tempted, purified, and at last triumphant human soul; it teaches the benign ministry of sorrow. His is the first keel that ever ventured into the silent sea of human consciousness to find a new world of poetry. He held heartbreak at bay for twenty years, and would not let himself die until he had done his task. Neither shall Longfellow. Neither shall I."
Lowell turned and started to descend. — Matthew Pearl

The Constitution favors no racial group, no political or social group. — William O. Douglas

I think about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who said that it's the questions that move us, not the answers. As a writer, I believe that it's our task, our responsibility, to hold the mirror up to social injustices that we see and to create a prayer of beauty. The questions serve us in that capacity. — Terry Tempest Williams

For suppose that every tool we had could perform its task, either at our bidding or itself perceiving the need, and if-like the statues made by Daedalus or the tripods of Hephaestus, of which the poet says that "self-moved they enter the assembly of the gods" - shuttles in a loom could fly to and fro and a plectrum play a lyre all self-moved, then master-craftsmen would have no need of servants nor masters of slaves. — Aristotle.

The poet's task is to give every echo a voice. — Marty Rubin

It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing - otherwise everything and everyone would be speaking once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to things. Rilke privileges two categories of 'entities' [Seienden), to express it in the papery diction of philosophy, that are eligible for the lofty task of acting as message-things - artifices and living creatures - with the latter gaining their particular quality from the former, as if animals were being's highest works of art before humans. Inherent to both is a message energy that does not activate itself, but requires the poet as a decoder and messenger. — Peter Sloterdijk

The man who entered was a stranger. He was young, tall, and something about him suggested violence, though she could not say what it was, because the first trait one grasped about him was a quality of self-control that seemed almost arrogant. — Ayn Rand

That perhaps is your task
to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way
that is what we look to you to do now. — Virginia Woolf

Johnson's later life, from 1763, is among the best documented of all literary lives. James Boswell gave himself the enormous task, after Johnson's death in 1784, of producing what is now held to be a model of biography; rich in detail and anecdote, a complete picture of the man and his times, traced over a period of more than twenty years. Boswell's Life of Johnson, published in 1791, carries on Johnson's own contribution to the growing art of biography, and consolidates Johnson's position as a major literary figure, who, although a poet and a novelist, is remembered more for his academic and critical achievement than for his creative writings. — Ronald Carter

Myth and tool mutually constitute each other. — Donna J. Haraway

Sometimes the world loses its face. it becomes too base. The task of the poet is to restore its face, because otherwise man is lost in doubt and despair. It is an indication that the world need not always be like this; it can be different.
When I wrote...that I accepted the salvational goal of poetry, that was exactly what I had in mind, and I still believe that poetry can either save or destroy nations. — Czeslaw Milosz

Hal answered him. "We're as sure as we can be. The guard captain said he found a ball of yellow glass. What else could it be?" Jesper shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe a ball of yellow glass? — John Flanagan