"The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember."

Poet, Anxiety, Help, Memories, Poems

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"The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember."

Exlpore more Poet quotes

"Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently."

Jean Cocteau, French Director

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"Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition."

Eli Khamarov, American Author

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"Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors."

James Broughton, American Director

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"A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses."

Jean Cocteau, French Director

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"Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence."

Brian Harris, American Lawyer

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"Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin."

Ernest Hemingway, American Novelist

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"It's difficult to get films made, especially films about poets."

Dougray Scott, Scottish Actor

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"When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble."

John C. Ransom, American Poet

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"I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself."

Diane Wakoski, American Poet

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"Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words."

Helen Dunmore, British Poet

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Explore more quotes by David Antin

"Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying."

Family

"While I don't script and I don't use other performers, I think my taste for underlying precision gives me something in common with Allan and George Brecht."

Brecht

"For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting."

Music

"I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember."

Hebrew

"A myth is the name of a terrible lie told by a smelly little brown person to a man in a white suit with a pair of binoculars."

Lie

"My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldn't understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer."

Family

"I'm standing up thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome. If not, I'm happy to see them go."

Thinking

"I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do."

Poetry

"There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be."

Society

"When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience."

Experience