10 Great Quotes About Poets and Poetry by Wallace Stevens

~ Paul Szlosek

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“A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”

“In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.”

“The poet is the priest of the invisible.”

“A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.”

“The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.”

“Poetry is a means of redemption.”

“The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.”

“The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.”

“Poetry is poetry, and one’s objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one’s objective in music is to achieve music.”

“Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it … if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, … it may be … that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.”

-Wallace Stevens

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Published by Paul Szlosek

Paul Szlosek was born in Southbridge, Massachusetts, but currently resides in the nearby metropolis of Worcester. He was co-founder and host of the long-running Poet’s Parlor poetry reading in Southbridge and Sturbridge, as well as a past recipient of the Jacob Knight Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in various local publications including the Worcester Review, Worcester Magazine, Sahara, Concrete Wolf, and Diner. He’s probably best known in the Worcester poetry community for his fanatical obsession with obscure poetry forms, and has invented his own including the ziggurat, the streetbeatina, and (most recently) the hodgenelle.

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