A Quote by Henrik Ibsen

The starving poet business is no good nowadays. — © Henrik Ibsen
The starving poet business is no good nowadays.
It took me awhile to not be ashamed to be a poet in the business environment, and to be a business person in the poet environment.
If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.
It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.
There is no business like show business, Irving Berlin once proclaimed, and thirty years ago he may have been right, but not anymore. Nowadays almost every business is like show business, including politics, which has become more like show business than show business is.
One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. 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. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.
Nowadays when a poet with one privately printed book can have his next three years taken care of by a Guggenheim fellowship, a Kenyon Review fellowship, and the Prix de Rome, it is hard to remember what chances the poet took in that small-town world, how precariously hand-to-mouth his existence was. And yet in one way the old days were better; [Vachel] Lindsay after a while, by luck and skill, got far more readers than any poet could get today.
He was a great poet" They lamented. No, he was not a great poet," said Theo, "He was a good poet, he could have been better. That's the real loss don't you see?
Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
We wouldnt ever eat anybody, would we? No. Of course not. Even if we were starving? We're starving now. You said we werent. I said we werent dying. I didnt say we werent starving. But we wouldnt. No. We wouldnt. No matter what. No. No matter what. Because we're the good guys. Yes. And we're carrying the fire. And we're carrying the fire. Yes. Okay.
If I were to have a dream job, it would probably be a poet. Then again, I don't think I'm a very good poet!
If you are under the illusion that you can start a business and run it at your life's schedule, you are mistaken. The business is like a starving puppy - when it needs to eat, then it needs to eat regardless of what you have going on personally.
Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths.
Nowadays it seems more and more like the 'business' in 'show business' is underlined, and there are campaigns, and it's all part of getting people in to see the movies.
A starving child is a frightful sight. A starving vampire, even worse.
One of the appeals of William Carlos Williams to me is that he was many different kinds of poet. He tried out many different forms in his own way of, more or less, formlessness. He was also a poet who could be - he was a love poet, he was a poet of the natural order and he was also a political poet.
Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people.
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