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"A poem . . .
begins as a lump in the throat,
a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. . . .
It finds the thought
and the thought finds the words."
Robert Frost
"You ask whether your verses are good.
You
ask me.
You have asked other before.
You send them to magazines.
You compare them with other poems,
and you
are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts.
Now I beg you to give up all that.
You are looking outward,
and that, above all, you should not do now.
Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody.
There is only one single
way.
Go into yourself.
Seach for the reason that bids you write.
This above all, ask yourself
in the stillest
hour of your night:
Must I write?"
Rainer Maria Rilke
"How so I explain
these poems?
Not at all.
I quit teaching in colleges
because it seemed so criminal
to explain works of
art.
The crisis in my teaching career came,
in fact, when I faced an audience
which expected me
to explain
Dubliners by James Joyce.
I was game.
I'd read the book.
But when I opened by big mouth,
no sounds came
out."
Anne Sexton
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"I write out of subjects.
I am experience
- oriented,
rather than word - oriented."
James Dickey
"To be a poet
is
a condition,
not a profession. "
Robert Frost
A poet is
a person
who manages,
in a lifetime
of standing out in thunderstorms,
to be struck by lightning
five
or six times.
Randall Jarell
A poet is an unhappy being
whose
heart is torn
by secret sufferings,
but whose lips are so strangely formed
that when the sighs
and the
cries escape them,
they sound like beautiful music...
Soren Kierkegaard
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