Posts tagged poets
Stay at it. Never give up.
”A great poet is greater than any king.
Yes, they do.
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feelings, reviews the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the springtime of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human nature, by vivid delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life.
Lew Welch and Allen Ginsberg outside City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco, October 30, 1963, the day of the Madame Nhu protest.
(by Shira Golding)
Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
Poets & Writers
Cover Story
Profiles of Joan Didion and André Aciman, a special section on how literary magazines and small presses are building community on and off the page, nine ways of looking at a bookstore, and more.
I got my issue yesterday. I’m about to sit down with a tall glass of wine and read it from cover to cover.
The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History
27. Harold Bloom on J.K. Rowling (2000)
“How to read ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.”
26. Vladimir Nabokov on Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Dostoevky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity — all this is difficult to admire.”
23. H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw
“An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”
21. Lord Byron on John Keats (1820)
“Here are Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom… No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.”
8. Elizabeth Bishop on J.D. Salinger
“I HATED [Catcher in the Rye]. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?”
3. Virginia Woolf on James Joyce
“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
[Click the link to read the entire list]
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d;
Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;
“Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;”
Desires compos’d, affections ever ev’n,
Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to Heav’n.
Grace shines around her with serenest beams,
And whisp’ring angels prompt her golden dreams.
For her th’ unfading rose of Eden blooms,
And wings of seraphs shed divine perfumes,
For her the Spouse prepares the bridal ring,
For her white virgins hymeneals sing,
To sounds of heav’nly harps she dies away,
And melts in visions of eternal day.
Me on the front porch of Robert E. Howard’s home. (Howard was a famous Texas author and poet).
I traveled to Cross Plains, Texas yesterday to see the Robert E. Howard home/museum. This is a picture of his workspace where he wrote his stories on a number 5 Underwood typwriter.
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All the quotes on this site are marked with the author's name, except those marked with TBV; those quotes are my own.
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