A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary greatly in different cultures and time periods. Throughout each civilization and language, poets have used various styles that have changed through the course of literary history, resulting in a history of poets as diverse as the literature they have produced.

French poet Arthur Rimbaud summarized the "poet" by writing,

A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men: the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed—and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and, if demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!

Poetry

Quotes on the subjects of Poetry, poems, and poets.

Sourced

• You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
  • John Adams, Letter to John Quincy Adams (14 May 1781)

• To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
  • Theodor Adorno, Cultural Criticism and Society (1949)

• The crown of literature is poetry.
  • Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism (1888) "Count Leo Tolstoi"

• Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
  • Aristotle, Poetics (335) 1451b 6

• Always be a poet, even in prose.
  • Charles Baudelaire, "My Heart Laid Bare" Intimate Journals, (1864)

• All poetry is misrepresentation.
  • Jeremy Bentham, An Aphorism attributed to him according to John Stuart Mill (see Mill's essay On Bentham and Coleridge in Utilitarianism edt. by Mary Warnock p. 123).

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Mon Sep 6 14:19:04 2010