Poets

Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet
-headed many will never learn to trust their artists. [Pound]
My Catholic Girlhood taught me two disciplines that are invaluable,
I think, for writing: the daily examination of conscience
and the meditation on holy pictures. [Warner] The business
of the poet is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest
things. [Hardy] A result which is sentimental is implemented
by what to the craftsman was private and unsentimental. [Moore]

[A] requisite in our poet or our maker is imitation, imitatio,
to be able to convert the substance or riches of another poet
to his own use. To make choice of one excellent man above the rest.
And so to follow him…Not as a creature that swallows what it takes in,
crude raw and undigested; but that feeds with an appetite,
and hath a stomach to concoct, divide, and turn all into nourishment. [Johnson]

Words are always getting conceptualized to some secondary meaning.
It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants into custody
and bring them back to their senses. Poets are the policemen of language,
always arresting those old reprobates, the words. [Yeats]

The multiplicity of nations and cultures in the word
makes it inevitable that the details and particulars
of human experience will vary according to time, place,
and circumstance, and it follows that the majority of writers
will dramatize and interpret human life according to usages
of their particular nation and epoch. [Jemie]

Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels. [Ginsberg]