Famous quotes containing the word poets:
“Don’t poets know it
Better than others
God can’t be always everywhere; and so,
Invented Mothers.”
—Sir Edward Arnold. Originally quoted in Jessie Bernard, The Future of Motherhood, New York, Penquin Books (1974)
“The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched by a wand, which makes us dance and run about happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“You know what? Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.”
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)