A Quote by Peter Davison

If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets. — © Peter Davison
If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.

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In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
Nearly all men and women are poetical, to some extent, but very few can be called poets. There are great poets, small poets, and men and women who make verses. But all are not poets, nor even good versifiers. Poetasters are plentiful, but real poets are rare. Education can not make a poet, though it may polish and develop one.
There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.
The phenomenon of Instagram poets - who are also, to be fair, Tumblr poets and Pinterest poets - has been one of the more surprising side-effects of the selfie age.
But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.
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.
Men of real talents in Arms have commonly approved themselves patrons of the liberal arts and friends to the poets, of their own as well as former times. In some instances by acting reciprocally, heroes have made poets, and poets heroes.
I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die.
The category "Women Poets" is bizarre and irrelevant. It's a subcategory of Poets, but there is not a "Men Poets" category.
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.
After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.
I don't know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets - the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from.
Sure there are poets which did never dream Upon Parnassus, nor did taste the stream Of Helicon; we therefore may suppose Those made not poets, but the poets those.
The poets are supposed to liberate the words – not chain them in phrases. Who told the poets they were supposed to think? Poets are meant to sing and to make words sing. Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? 'Your very own words,' indeed! And who are you?
When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.
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