A Quote by Helen Vendler

There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.

Helen Vendler

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Fame Many Poets Rests Single Whose Work

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Helen Vendler
American - Critic
Born: April 30, 1933

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

James Broughton

Had there been no Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other lands English history would, it may be, have become as important to the English imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination; and many plays by many poets would have woven it into a single story whose contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would have made living men and women seem like swallows building their nests under the architrave of some Temple of the Giants.

William Butler Yeats

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

Billy Collins

When a society has doubts about its future, it tends to produce spokesmen whose main appeal is to the emotions, who argue from intuitions, and whose claim to be truth-bearers rests solely on intense personal feeling.

Kenneth Tynan

The fame of surgeons resembles the fame of actors, who live only during their lifetime and whose talent is no longer appreciable once they have disappeared.

Honore de Balzac

There have been many most excellent poets that have never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets.

Philip Sidney

Poets are regarded as handicapped writers whose work must be treated with a tender condescension, such as one accords the athletic achievements of basketball players confined to wheelchairs.

Thomas M. Disch

The way I mainly use the Internet is keeping in touch with poets that live far away. My main interest is contemporary American poets and some Spanish language poets, and I keep in touch with their work through either their websites or email.

John Burnside

Like a child star whose fame fades as the years advance, many once-innovative companies become less so as they mature.

Gary Hamel

Many species of wit are quite mechanical; these are the favorites of witlings, whose fame in words scarce outlives the remembrance of their funeral ceremonies.

Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.

Grace Paley

Your fame is as the grass, whose hue comes and goes, and His might withers it by whose power it sprang from the lap of the earth.

Dante Alighieri

Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?

Susanna Kaysen

All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own.

Haniel Long

Prophets, mystics, poets, scientific discoverers are men whose lives are dominated by a vision; they are essentially solitary men . . . whose thoughts and emotions are not subject to the dominion of the herd.

Bertrand Russell

I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, and the British poets who were imported through that important anthology put together by Alvarez - and those would include Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. And I think these poets gave me assurance that there were other ways to write besides the rather involuted style of high modernism whose high priests were Pound, Eliot and Stevens, and Crane perhaps.

Billy Collins

A Quote by Helen Vendler

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