Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.
Poets don’t draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
I’ve been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.
Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality.
The great poets have sympathized with the people. They have uttered in all ages the human cry. Unbought by gold, unawed by power, they have lifted high the torch that illuminates the world.
Well, it’s a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it’s no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.
I didn’t know any poets growing up in Kansas.
The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.
I think one of the things that language poets are very involved with is getting away from conventional ideas of beauty, because those ideas contain a certain attitude toward women, certain attitudes toward sex, certain attitudes toward race, etc.
New voices in an old art – and women poets have been that for much more than a century – do not diminish the art through the category. They enrich it. They renew it with common quandaries of craft and innovation. The category simply allows the quandaries to be seen more clearly.
I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate, and there are some critics who have no ear for it. An irresponsible critic can do a lot of psychic damage, but eventually, they don’t affect your work.
I feel very connected to poets across the country.
It’s difficult to get films made, especially films about poets.
Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.
I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say, your professional poets, I mean there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.
The lovely daisy, so justly celebrated by European poets, is not a native of our soil; we know it well, however, by cultivation in our gardens and green houses; besides, we are disposed to remember it for the sake of those who have sung its praises in immortal verse.
I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie.
Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.
Of poets I put Virgil first – he was greatest.
When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read – Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier – were rhyme poets. That’s what captured me.
I think ‘Dead Poets’ was probably my favorite, just to get started with the idea of doing a movie that people treated as more than a movie.
I don’t like the word ‘poetry,’ and I don’t like poetry readings, and I usually don’t like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I’m kind of a curator, and I’m kind of a night-owl reporter.
But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.
I’m an amalgam of the 19th-century romantics and the beat poets.
If poets were realistic, they wouldn’t be poets.
I am happy that I could collaborate with poets like O.N.V. Kurup and Yusufali Kechery in my career; they wrote meaningful lyrics, which made my songs last longer.
The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals – its philosophers, its poets and its artists.
Poets, I think, are born. You can’t teach it. It’s genetic – the circumstances of how you were raised… and there’s probably some Irish in your blood lines.
In reading, we are both scientists and poets.
I’m not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.
Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something – with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.
Poets are always making waves. I mean, you know, in an ideal situation, the ideal republic can’t tolerate poets because – it isn’t that they mutter and criticize; it is that the poet does not accept the situation called the ‘perfect’ condition of man – in other words, perfect in the materialistic sense.
When I got to Grinnell College, I was part of the black turtleneck sweater and Camel cigarette crowd of poets and writers.
I hear poets complaining: ‘We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that.’
Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.
I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.
Amy Winehouse and Paul Weller are examples of poets, I think.
Even the greatest poets can’t express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.
The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind.
If you read the poets of the 19th century in Latin America, you would see that Havana or Mexico City or Buenos Aires are incredibly modern and global cities that they were not. And eventually they became real, and they became real because people read these books and tried to live in a better world.
Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.
I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.
I can’t look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do.
Good poets borrow; great poets steal.
There is an extraordinary degree of amity among Washington poets. They hang together. You would be hard pressed to find that in Manhattan.
There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.
When I was ten, I spent a school holiday watching a lot of films: ‘Dead Poets Society’, ‘Stand By Me’, ‘Home Alone’ and ‘The Goonies’. It completely inspired me. I told my parents I wanted to become an actor after that.
Poetry itself hasn’t been well served by poets who fled to the margins.
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
I still believe many poets begin in fear and hope: fear that the poetic past will turn out to be a monologue rather than a conversation. And hope that their voice can be heard as that past turns into a future.
Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country’s poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain.
I love poetry. I love rhyming. Do you know, there are poets who don’t rhyme? Shakespeare did not rhyme most of the time, and that’s why I do not like him.
Poets often are dealing with history and are thinking about the way history moves across us, and we move in it.
You go to a Springsteen show, and half of the people are there to party and forget about their cares, and they’re being drawn to this visceral experience. And then the other half, you know, has lived and died with his ‘Nebraska’ album and considers him one of the greatest poets.
These poets (fans of whatever) should be contacting other young poets on their way – not those who have made it, who sit on a star and then have plenty of problems: usually no money, usually the fear their own writing is going down the sink hole.
‘Ageism,’ or whatever you want to call it, is a very English phenomenon. You don’t get it too much in many other cultures. And no one says it about authors or poets or filmmakers. ‘Oh, they’re too old to make films or write books.’
