A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
Wisdom was a teapot, pouring from above. Desolation angels, served it up with love.
The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
Robert Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even - "at least not systematic"; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest.
O woman! thou wert fashioned to beguile: So have all sages said, all poets sung.
Whosoever loves not picture is injurious to truth, and all the wisdom of poetry. Picture is the invention of heaven, the most ancient and most akin to nature. It is itself a silent work, and always one and the same habit.
Children have a master to teach them, grown-ups have the poets.
All great poets have been men of great knowledge.
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 re-tuning of the world itself.
You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
Really, he thought, if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?
When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
In Náhuatl, the language of the Aztec world, one key word for poet was 'tlamatine,' meaning 'the one who knows,' or 'he who knows something.' Poets were considered 'sages of the word,' who meditated on human enigmas and explored the beyond, the realm of the gods.
A wise man can and should stand above his times, not so the poet, but he should be their apex.
Drew Dellinger is a deep and courageous poet. How lucky we are!
We must listen to poets.
The nature of rumor is well known to all. It was your own poet who said: 'Rumor, an evil surpassing all evils in speed.'
The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.
There is, in all great poets, a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise.
Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
Poets are like proverbs: you can always find one to contradict another.
They (the poets) are to us in a manner the fathers and authors of the wisdom.
How many modern transsexuals are unacknowledged shamans? Perhaps it is to poets they should go for counsel, rather than surgeons.
Scholars of the Hebrew bible define something they call wisdom literature and I would say clearly the poetry of wisdom is something that comes with age or that might come with age which has to do with reflecting on experience.
