Snapshots from "A Poet's Sourcebook" (8)

from Edward Thomas
Possibly at nineteen Herrick really believed that in the country all was "purling springs, groves, birds, and well-weav'd bowers, with fields enamelled with flowers"; that there were none of those "desperate cares th' industrious merchant has"; that men there ate only "to cool, not cocker appetite," and "content makes all ambrosia"--"boiled nettles" and all. But it is more likely that Herrick got it all from books.

from Wallace Stevens
For my own part I like to live in a classic atmosphere, full of my own gods and to be true to them until I have some better authority than merely a contrary opinion for not being true to them.

from Lytton Strachey
[Thomas Lovell Beddoes's] tragedy, like Hamlet's, was the tragedy of an overpowerful will--a will so strong as to recoil upon itself, and fall into indecision.

from Virginia Woolf
They were boastful, triumphant; it seemed to both that they had read every book in the world; known every sin, passion, and joy.

from Ezra Pound
Obviously, it is not easy to be a great poet. If it were, many more people would have done so.

from T. S. Eliot
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.

from Vladimir Nabokov
The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions.

from Theodore Roethke
You know how things get from too much laundering: the rubber in the various intimate equipment disintegrates, the string would bust in my sweat pants; there'd be a hole in my racket. Well, do you get the analogy: that's me and free verse.

from Czeslaw Milosz
For we all who are here, both the speaker and you who listen, are no more than links between the past and future.

A Keresan Poet
I refuse to tell it.