Words matter. These are the best Poet Quotes from famous people such as Ama Ata Aidoo, Jim Carroll, Natasha Trethewey, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louis MacNeice, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
At the age of 15, a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how I replied that I wanted to be a poet.
When I came back to New York, it was such a joke because I was always referred to as the pure young poet who wasn’t in it for what he could get out of it. And all of a sudden, the pure young poet comes back… and I’m hanging out with the Rolling Stones.
I think that as a poet, I am always concerned about history and baring witness to history. But so often, it’s through the research that I do, the reading.
Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.
The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life.
I was a serious poet for quite a while and had little notebooks filled with poetry.
I wrote an ITV drama in the 1960s, a satire on management theory that starred Leonard Rossiter. I’m also a poet and have had work in the ‘Spectator.’
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.
The poet is someone, I think, who’s interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.
I always thought I was going to be a great poet, and go and live in New York, where the great poets lived – you know, where Whitman had walked the streets.
And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.
I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.
It’s a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together.
Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it’s reflected in his writings.
None merits the name of Creator but God and the poet.
From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue.
But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.
I was a piano player before I was a poet.
I know when I go to a poetry reading, I feel purged, exulted. You let the poet guide you through some kind of journey.
The poet’s perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely.
Dante Alighieri is a universal poet, and great creators, they are writing for everybody always. Every single verse is very moving, and the beauty – if we don’t understand, we just stay listening to the sound and it’s like hearing music.
Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.
I am a member of the Muskogee people. I’m a poet, a musician, a dreamer of sorts, a questioner. Like everyone else, I’m looking for answers of some sort or the other.
I can’t believe there is a poet who hasn’t eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It’s part of the process of selection.
According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.
Never use the word ‘audience.’ The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don’t have an ‘audience’. They’re talking to a single person all the time.
It’s the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.
I’m a student at Harvard University, and currently work as the United States Youth Poet Laureate, a community organizer, and an activist.
When you see the poet laureate saying that every child should have read ‘Ulysses’ and that you’re just giving up on children if you think it’s elitist – does that include children with special needs or whose first language isn’t English?
There is scarcely anything to which I am so feelingly alive as the honour and welfare of my country, and, as a poet, I have no higher enjoyment than singing her sons and daughters.
I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.
The writer, the poet, the novelist, are all creators. This does not mean that they invent language; it means that they use language to create beauty, ideas, images. This is why we cannot do without them.
When men are prosperous, they are in love with life. Nature grows beautiful, the arts begin to flourish, there is work for painter and sculptor, the poet is born, the stage is erected – and this life with which men are in love is represented in a thousand forms.
I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he’s a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.
A good rapper is an amazing thing to me. It’s like a 17th-, 18th-century poet.
I’m not literary, and I’m not academic, and I don’t think like a poet, so my stuff will never be like that.
It is always a disappointment to turn from forthright consideration of some subject – whether from the Left or the Right, a poet or a plumber – to the Beltway version, in which the only aspects of the issue that matter are the effects it will have on the fortunes of the two parties and the various men in power.
The power of daring anything their fancy suggest, as always been conceded to the painter and the poet.
Everyone is their own kind of poet – you can’t miss it when their words are written down.
The man of science is nothing if not a poet gone wrong.
A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.
My brother told me I was going to be a poet. I had a good brother. He did a lot of good brotherly work.
The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture.
When Castro was put on trial in 1953 by Batista’s government and asked who was intellectually responsible for his first attempt at insurrection, he dropped the name of the poet Jose Marti.
When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.
Ambiguity around ambiguity is forgivable in an unpublished poet and expected of an arts student on the pull: for a professional comedian demoting himself to the role of ‘thinker’, with stadiums full of young people hanging on his every word, it won’t really do.
But the lover’s power is the poet’s power. He can make love from all the common strings with which this world is strung.
The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.
With lyrics, being a poet gave me a different approach than other people.
My own journey in becoming a poet began with memory – with the need to record and hold on to what was being lost. One of my earliest poems, ‘Give and Take,’ was about my Aunt Sugar, how I was losing her to her memory loss.
I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the world’s greatest dramatic poet, but regret that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the hands of his daughter, and therefore I have prepared the Family Shakespeare.
Astronomers have been bewildered by the theory of an expanding universe, but there is no less expansion in the moral infinite of the universe of man. As far as the frontiers of science are pushed back, over the extended arc of these frontiers one will hear the poet’s hounds on the chase.
Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.
I’ve never bought a Dylan record. A singing poet? It just bores me to tears. I’ve got to tell you, if I had 10 Dylans in the final of ‘American Idol,’ we would not be getting 30 million viewers a week. I don’t believe the Bob Dylans of this world would make ‘American Idol ‘a better show.
For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one’s own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.
It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the ’50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.
Rock and roll kind of screwed up my voice poetically. I found myself having this ‘Beat’ voice in my poems. It was like this self-fulfilled prophecy because everybody was calling me this rock poet, this Beat poet.
By the ’80s, anything to do with punk was perceived as rancid. Me being known as the ‘punk poet’ meant my work and I plummeted.
Yes, I am the first Latino poet laureate in the United States. But I’m also here for everyone and from everyone. My voice is made by everyone’s voices.
I did not start out thinking I’m going to become a feminist poet. It was a tag I was given.
Once I stop being a citizen of the U.S.S.R., I will not stop being a Russian poet.
A novelist, poet and playwright who writes equally well in Shona and English, Charles Mungoshi is Zimbabwe’s finest and most versatile writer. His life project has been to interrogate the notion of family.
When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
My father is a poet, my stepmother is a poet, and so I always had encouragement as a child to write.
The poet existed among the cave men; he will exist among men of the atomic age, for he is an inherent part of man. Even religions have been born from the need for poetry, which is a spiritual need, and it is through the grace of poetry that the divine spark lives forever in the human flint.
I’m tired of being this solemn poet of the masses, the enigma shrouded in a mystery.
I think there’s a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that’s a beautiful line.
I shall, in due time, be a Poet.
Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.
At the end of the day, Johnny Cash was a poet.
The epic poet collaborates with the spirit of his time in the composition of his work. That is, if he is successful; the time may refuse to work with him, but he may not refuse to work with his time.
Being identified as a poet in France or Denmark or India one is greeted with gracious respect.
I’ve always had the wish, the need, and the obsession to become a public poet.
I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.
I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one’s finest work.
As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
The poet’s expression of joy conceals his despair at not having found the reality of joy.
From the throes of inspiration and the eddies of thought the poet may at last be able to arrive at, and convey the right admixture of words and meaning.
With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.
Women are very different to men, and that hasn’t been respected. So when people say there’s never been a good woman painter or poet or engineer or whatever, they don’t understand that our skills are many simultaneously and men’s skills are single.
Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.
Let’s detox our cluttered academic brain. That’s what the poet does. People call it daydreaming, detoxing our minds and taking care of that clutter. It’s being able to let in call letters from the poetry universe.
The 500 years following the fall of the Western Roman Empire were dubbed by the poet Petrarch ‘dark.’ Although the 14th-century Italian was referring to a literary decline, the term caught on to denote the seemingly backward turn the Western world took with regard to religious and technological developments.
Much of a poet’s experience takes place in imagination only; the life he tells is oftenest the life that he strongly desires to live, and the power, the purity and height of his utterance may not seldom be the greater because experience here uses the voices of desire.
The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.
One of my very favourite poets was a Massachusetts poet named Robert Lowell.
Kanye West is a brilliant poet and artist. He and I work in a very similar way. We feel the vibration, the power of something, and it inspires us to create, whether it is music or design. It is the same process. Working with Kanye is a joy and great privilege. In 2012, we did collaboration together.
I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.
It always has been and forever will be impossible for slavery or any kind or form of injustice to produce a great poet.
Frost isn’t exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.
What’s funny about the slacker thing, people project an image of what they think a musician is: young, slack, unemployed – like a really romantic idea of a poet, writer or musician – which isn’t really true a lot of the time. I don’t reckon you would know anything about me if I wasn’t moderately hard-working.
My poet’s heart gives me strength to face political problems, particularly those which have a bearing on my conscience.
The poet is the voice of the people. And when the poet presents certain ideas, two phrases in one poem can alter a generation’s view. So poets have always been feared – and controlled and jailed.
And muse on Nature with a poet’s eye.
The Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes wrote that beauty is fundamental. Well, with the poet’s permission, so is courage.
Jim Longenbach, poet, critic, and my husband, is always passing along life-changing books for me to read.
Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
The poet does not know – often he will never know – whom he really writes for.
Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.
If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
That is the best instruction you could ever give a poet: whether you’re examining a bad line in a poem or a bad motive for action, keep well your repining – meaning, don’t ignore the honest muttering in your head.
Many luckless people imagine that romance is dead: some, overcivilised, fondly suppose that there never was romance: a poet tells us that romance is unrecognised though really present: but scientists can meet him daily, walking at large and undisguised in the world.
I thought that if one wanted to be a writer, one had to write novels because I didn’t know that one could be a poet.
A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.
I am a greedy poet. I keep munching life all the time. Sweet, sour and bitter moments.
But you have to understand that I consider myself a very modest artist, or whatever, and not of importance really at all – it is quite embarrassing to me to be asked my opinion about things. I am only a wee Scottish poet on the outside of everything.
I’m a political poet – let us say a ‘human’ poet, a poet that’s concerned with the plight of people who suffer. If words can be of assistance, then that’s what I’m going to use.
Anyone who holds a pen these days thinks he or she is a poet.
Every revolutionary poet or lyricist has been criticised for something. If you come up with something new, there will always be people who will object to it.
I am no Poet here; my pen’s the spout where the rain water of my eyes run out.
Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.
Thus, the poet’s word is beginning to strike forcefully upon the hearts of all men, while absolute men of letters think that they alone live in the real world.
Walt Whitman is the only great modern poet who does not seem to experience discord when he faces his world. Not even solitude – his monologue is a universal chorus.
When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things – it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.
The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects.
I had one week in the fall of 1996 where I was like, ‘I’m America’s greatest living teenage poet.’
I’m uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem.
I sing in languages that I speak. So when I’m singing a Schubert song, I know precisely what every word means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or French Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever.
I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.
My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
I would say Gary Snyder, who is from my part of the world as a poet and environmental thinker, will be read just as Henry Thoreau as John Muir will continue to be read.
If you like to read, sometimes it’s interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet… Sometimes you can go looking for illumination.
One travels so as to learn once more how to marvel at life in the way a child does. And blessed be the poet, the artist who knows how to keep alive his sense of wonder.
I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
A poem is a naked person… Some people say that I am a poet.
A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.
The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.
It has often struck me that the relation of two important members of the social body to one another has never been sufficiently considered, or treated of, so far as I know, either by the philosopher or the poet.
Even if you walk exactly the same route each time – as with a sonnet – the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet’s health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.
The violinist must possess the poet’s gift of piercing the protective hide which grows on propagandists, stockbrokers and slave traders, to penetrate the deeper truth which lies within.
Tennyson seems to be the patron saint of the wishy washies, which is perhaps why I admire him so much, not only as a poet, but as a man.
I’d like people to remember me for a diligent expert workman. I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God’s a workman. I don’t think there’s anything better than a workman.
So I really began as a failed poet – although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what’s really on my mind.
I have always used a great variety of verse forms, especially in my poetry for children. I believe that poetry begins in childhood and that a poet who can remember his own childhood exactly can, and should, communicate to children.
I have felt at times with groups of children that I was really being what every poet would like to be – a bard in the old sense.
I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet’s language at that point in history, and so it’s even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.
The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.
What made me a comedian was that I wasn’t really a songwriter, I was more of a poet.
I’ve been a character actress right from the beginning. I was no more like ‘Cinderella’ in my real life than I was like the neurotic poet in ‘Cop.’
I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.
A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.
More than any other poet, Whitman is what we make him; more than any other poet, his greatest value is in what he suggests and implies rather than in what he portrays, and more than any other poet must he wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of himself.
We used to play the underground clubs like the UFO, and Middle Earth, and they were great because they would have on things like a poet, string quartets, and then a rock band! It was kinda cool!
There is nothing settled about a poet’s identity. The becoming doesn’t stop because the being has been achieved. They proceed together, attached in ways that are hard to be exact about.
If I am not mistaken, it was a British poet who said that ‘no one is properly dressed unless he wears a smile.’
I hate being called poet/dramatist/translator/director. ‘Poet’ covers it all for me.
Being a poet, the advantages of dyslexia are many, affording me sensitivity to the musical nuances of language and the ability to juggle complicated ideas and narratives simultaneously.
In the fall of 1963, in Leningrad, in what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the young poet Dmitry Bobyshev stole the young poet Joseph Brodsky’s girlfriend.
The commitment to working at poetry is important because a poet is a maker, and a poem is a made thing. We have to honor our feelings by working to transform them into something meaningful and lasting.
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
A man may be variously accomplished, and yet be a feeble poet.
In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.
‘Love’ is so short of perfect rhymes that convention allows half-rhymes like ‘move.’ The alternative is a plague of doves, or a kind of poem in which the poet addresses his adored both as ‘love’ and as ‘guv’ – a perfectly decent solution once, but only once, in a while.
You get early inoculation against the idea of success if you’re a poet. When I published my first collection of sonnets, I sold about five copies; now kids study them for A level. Wanting to be successful in that other world of money or fame is not interesting. Poetry isn’t like that, and it never has been.
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.
To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.
I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.
‘Alphabet’ by the late Danish poet Inger Christensen. It’s a book-length abecedarian poem. It’s an activist text but also a portal to wonder.
Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior as time goes by. He’s a warrior first and a poet second.
Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.
In my opinion, Al Moritz may be the best poet of his generation in Canada.
No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
Technological prescience in science fiction usually requires an author with luck. Societal prescience requires a poet.
You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.
If I were to have a dream job, it would probably be a poet. Then again, I don’t think I’m a very good poet!
A paranoiac like a poet, is born, not made.
I’ve often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.
You don’t have to be a poet, you don’t have to be a politician or be in the White House to make an impact with your words. We all have this capacity to find solutions for the future.
The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
My grandmother was energetic and fearless – a talented poet and songwriter. She was also interested in chemistry and history and medicine, taking care of the people in her hacienda in Mexico, delivering babies. She could have become anything, but this was the 1930s, and she was forced into an arranged marriage.
When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn’t worth reading.
When American poet Alice Notley was very young, she used to sit in front of the radio and just listen. When she got older, she began to hear words and songs in her head everywhere she went – songs she loved, like ‘Begin the Beguine’ by Cole Porter, and her own words that sometimes tumbled out into poems.
Just after graduation in 1966, like many of my contemporaries, I applied for research training at the National Institutes of Health. Perhaps because his wife was a poet, Ira Pastan agreed to take me into his laboratory, despite my lack of scientific credentials.
Few in the Nineties would have ventured to prophesy that the remote dim singer of the Celtic Twilight would, in a new age, become the leading poet of the English-speaking world. None have disputed the claim of William Butler Yeats to that title.
‘Allama’ is a period film set in the 12th century, for which I had to sport a different look. The story is about a mystic saint and Vachana poet Allama Prabhu and I play a dancer in it.
The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.
My father was a rare poet. He was somebody who worked in the trenches. When he wanted to speak about social justice or gender empowerment, he spoke through his poetry.
A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don’t get it, I’m not sure why you are doing it.
People can’t see that if I had not been a poet, I could never have had such success as a traveler.
At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.
When you act, you’ve got to be like a poet or a musician. It’s not about evidence before court. It’s not a forensic subject. It’s poetry; it’s a completely different place.
I don’t fit into the age, race, or class of a bestselling poet.
When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship.
It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back.
The strong bond of sisterhood was a famous trait in classical art and literature about Amazons. But it was modern people who interpreted that as a sexual preference for women. That started in the 20th century. The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva declared that Amazons were symbolic of lesbianism in antiquity.
The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.
People who think that Sylvia Plath was a poor, sensitive poet are not getting that she had great amounts of ambition and anger that moved her along, or she wouldn’t have been able to fight against that depression to produce such an incredible body of work by the age of thirty.
The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.
As a film-maker and a poet, I feel it’s my duty to be an eye and an antenna to what’s happening around me. I always felt a solidarity with those who are desperate and confused and misused and are seeking a way out of it.
But maybe it’s up in the hills under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it’s never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is always only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.
Wolverine is a world-weary old warrior. His rage issue notwithstanding, I see him as someone with the tortured soul of a poet, but one who has seen too many friends and lovers die. Even with that, he has grown into a leader and a true hero.
You know, one of my favorite movies that inspired me and got me started was ‘Dead Poet’s Society.’
I think it better that in times like these a poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.
To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.
Wagner always opens you a second breath, and then you go on, and you are absolutely into his musical world, and you can’t stop, and you can listen for four hours, five hours, six hours, and then you are like in his mystical hands of his music. He’s such a great poet of music.
The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it’s impossible to make something out of words and not communicate.
Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.
The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.
I used to write a lot of songs. I was an English major in college. I was a deluded poet for a year. Totally deluded.
A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
The time of illusion, then, is the beautiful moment of passion; it represents the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to be free to do the very best that he can.
The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.
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.
There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.
I am so much like my mother. When we’re in a room together everybody always comments on how spooky it is. I would say I get most of the musicality from my mum – and my dad, but I think my dad is the poet, you know.
Poetry is – it’s an art form, but, to me, it’s also a weapon, it’s also an instrument. It’s the ability to make ideas that have been known, felt and said. And that’s a real, I think, type of duty for the poet.
I earn more than I thought I would when I became a poet.
Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister – who is a children’s writer married to a poet.
The degree in which a poet’s imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
It wasn’t a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing – and loving. Language became an addiction.
To be a poet is as serious, long-term and natural as the effort to be the best human you can be. To express something well is not a question of having a top-class education and understanding poetic forms: rather, it’s a question of paying attention.
Potter is jealous of potter, and craftsman of craftsman; and the poor have a grudge against the poor, and the poet against the poet.
I’m the weird poet who has paid her dues in the experimental world for 30 or 40 years.
I’d kill to be a poet.
Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.
But Racine’s extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great psychologist.
Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge’they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.
The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.
There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.
I call what I do ‘modal structures.’ Sometimes they’re songs, sometimes they’re longer, sometimes they’re this mantra – I’ve never called myself a spoken word poet.
I remember seeing ‘Dead Poet’s Society,’ and it made it appealing in a way that I actually went to prep school.
You can’t read to yourself. It’s your inner ear that hears a poem. If you hear a poet read his own work, it becomes very exciting. The melody is a great part of it.
Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She’s not a symbol.
The wonderful 17th Century poet, Robert Herrick, wrote a poem entitled, ‘To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses.’ Easy to say, Robert Herrick; not always easy to do. But it’s a good slogan, I think.
I am not less poet; I am more conscious of all that I am, am not, and might become.
The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
I’m a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.
You don’t become a poet if you want to make any money.
The poet is primarily a spokesman, making statements or incantations on behalf of himself or others – usually for both, for it is difficult to speak for oneself without speaking for others or to speak for others without speaking for oneself.
Find a poet whose style you like, emulate that style, then deal with things that you know about – don’t waste your time looking for your own style.’ I wish I could remember who told me that, because I’d like to congraulate him. I’ve emulated all the old guys – Tennyson, Alexander Pope.
I love the 19th-century idea of the flaneur, the poet wandering through the streets.
The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear.
I cannot write poetically, for I am no poet. I cannot make fine artistic phrases that cast light and shadow, for I am no painter. I can neither by signs nor by pantomime express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer; but I can by tones, for I am a musician.
I cannot say I’m a poet. That’s for someone when they take in consideration where they can bestow ‘poet’ on. I can’t do it. But I would be disingenuous if I didn’t say that my intention is poetry.
I believe the poet shouldn’t be in the poem at all except as a lens or as ears.
I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming out of the music world, the two of them.
Lyrics became important for a while in the late Seventies. Patti Smith was a poet and a rock star, as much one as the other, the distinctions were a bit blurred and then you get swept up in it. Punk poet, it’s a good enough term.
A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.
Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.
At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.
My mom is Irish. She is a poet and a humanitarian who believed in ensuring that people around her had a better life.
Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist.
I wore a cloak for many years, I had long hair, I may have had a drop earring for a week and I fancied myself as a philosopher poet but was somewhere more in the gay female leisure pirate.
The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
A starry sky is equally interesting to a scientist, a mystic, an ethics scholar, and a poet. Looking at the stars, each experiences something different, and each sees his own picture.
I think there’s a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that’s music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative – they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever.
Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I’ve always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher’s the poet’s equal there.
My mother was an actress and a director, as well. And my father was a playwright and poet.
I come from a short fiction background, and my mom is a poet, so I’ve always read poetry; I’ve always had a lot of different influences both linguistically and musically.
Sport in itself has this power. If you are a poet or a singer, people gravitate. I may not be in the same category, but I will make a comparison with Bob Marley. So it isn’t just cricket where social commentary plays a huge part.
There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
Love is poetry. To fall in love with a person is like understanding a deep, moving poem. Noticing every little detail. To see what the poet shows, to smell what he describes and the urge to taste the intangible.
He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.
Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many scientists refused to grant him a hearing because he was a poet and therefore, they felt, he couldn’t be serious.
I think some period drama can be quite alienating, but ‘Downton’ isn’t. This is going to sound quite, um, pretentious, but someone said that it’s like a soap written by a poet.
I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet’s life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.
I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet’s personality.
It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.
A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure.
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
Pakistan is heir to an intellectual tradition of which the illustrious exponent was the poet and philosopher Mohammad Iqbal. He saw the future course for Islamic societies in a synthesis between adherence to the faith and adjustment to the modern age.
Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. – A theme for a great poet would be God’s boredom on the seventh day of creation.
I’m really lucky in that I can do lots of different things. It must be really hard to just be a poet or just be a novelist – a constant cycle of effort and exhaustion and recuperation.
I want to be remembered as a poet, a peacemaker, and a philosopher who played.
Life as a poet and actor truly became full circle as I stood on stage as host of ‘Verses & Flow’ and lived in both of these outfits. It was one of the best experiences of my professional life.
Jim, as just a spoken poet, was not that good. He needed the music behind him. He felt a security and a sense of abandon when the music existed around him.
I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.
A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
I’ve never written poetry. I’m not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can’t waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything’s got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.
A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so.
I do not want to be bored listening to music that is muffled and known only to the poet himself.
Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a ‘poet.’ After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.
I’m a poet.
A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.
The poet has no greater number of muscles than the ordinary conversationalist; he merely has more highly developed muscles and better coordination. And he practises his activity according to a stricter set of rules.
To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
I’m not a journalist; I’m a poet.
And some poets are far better read off the page because they’re very bad speakers. I’m thinking of one in particular whom I won’t name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.
The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain – a magic wand in Nature’s hand – every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?
There was no real poet in the band, but we tried.
Poetry is interesting because not everyone is going to become a great poet, but anyone can be, and anyone can enjoy poetry, and it’s this openness, this accessibility of poetry that makes it the language of people.
Identifying Israel with Jewry obscures the existence of the small but important post-Zionist movement in Israel, including the philosophers Adi Ophir and Anat Biletzki, the sociologist Uri Ram, the professor of theatre Avraham Oz and the poet Yitzhak Laor.
Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people.
The poet begins where the man ends. The man’s lot is to live his human life, the poet’s to invent what is nonexistent.
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn’t exist or inhere in poems alone.
We are proud to have with us the poet lariat of Chicago.
Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.
These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: Can’t live with them, or without them.
I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn’t agree with Bly that it’s a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.
I was born in the Bay Area because my dad was a semi-professional photographer and poet who was really into John Coltrane. He’s had many lives. My dad’s a capitalist to his bone, but he’s also a human to his bone.
In African-American culture, there’s often a family historian, someone who does the genealogy or keeps the family Bible. I became aware that might be one role the poet has.
I’ve always been a poet. My dad went to Lincoln University with Gil-Scott Heron, so I came out of the womb listening to Gil-Scott Heron.
As the poet has expected, the alarms now are sounded, for – and it must be said again – the birth of a poet is always a threat to the existing cultural order, because he attempts to break through the circle of literary castes to reach the center.
I saw an amazing film when I was 16 called ‘Slam’. It’s about a spoken-word poet. Saul Williams is in it.
So, I’ve never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don’t want to be read as just a black poet, or just a woman poet, or just someone who represents a cause, an anti-Vietnam war poet.
I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.
The poet does not fear death, not because he believes in the fantasy of heroes, but because death constantly visits his thoughts and is thus an image of a serene dialogue.
I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.
I’ve always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don’t think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.
I don’t think that I ever believed that poetry would be a career. I have always thought of poems as something more private than professional… I would never introduce myself as a poet. I will always have some other thing that I am.
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
I am a poet; I am not a worker. I need to be free.
What’s really funny about being National Youth Poet Laureate is that not everyone even knows it exists.
Edgar Allan Poe, I think he’s a brilliant poet. I was actually given a copy of his work when I was, like, 8 years old that was my grandfather’s, and I still carry it around with me.
‘A Death in the Gunj’ is set in 1979 and we had to mute a joke that referred to Indira Gandhi. The censors also wouldn’t allow the tortoise that some of the characters talk about to be called Kalidas because it’s the name of a respected poet.
One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.
I actually started out as a poet in high school. I published in small literary magazines for probably about ten years. I entered the Yale Younger Poet contest every year, until I was too old to be a younger poet, and I never got more than a form rejection letter from them.
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
The poet’s spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth.
The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren’t so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he’s a poet in black and white.
Novelist and poet David Huddle is a quiet but fabulous writer, and he does adolescent longing better than anyone I know.
It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.
I remember, in fifth grade, doing a report on the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin as a rap. It was just an easy way to get an A back then because everyone was turning in boring stuff.
I have got pictures all around the rooms I sit in. I have got a very mad picture of a dog standing on a black thing on a piece of rope. It was drawn and painted by a Romanian poet who was under house arrest, and it is terrific.
For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature.
‘Rather You Than Me’ just speaks for my natural instinct to survive, but it’s also me being a writer, me being a poet – there’s also a beautiful side to ‘Rather You Than Me.’
I’ve not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get… credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.
No bad man can be a good poet.
My focus is on the reader and that the poet’s job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet’s job is to inspire some future reader.
What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.
Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.
In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.
I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a children’s author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first woman president.
When I talk of hearing a poet’s voice speaking, I always think of it as in the presence of the man.
I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows – except us – that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet.
I didn’t have a dream of being a press secretary, I had a dream of being a playwright; I had a dream of being a novelist and a poet.
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
To the poet, his travels, his adventures, his loves, his indignations are finally resolved in verse, and this, in the end becomes his permanent, indestructible life.
The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.
I think of myself as a poet. I grew up with poetic influences – what I know from my background is the bardic poetry, which came down through oral tradition.
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
The poet craves emotion, and feeds the fire that consumes him, and only under this condition is he baptized with creative power.
Kevin Smith is so great in ‘Kingdom Come,’ isn’t he? He’s kind of this very earthy poet. He just has this immediate gregariousness, like, you kind of just want to be his pal.
I’ve known the poet Eileen Myles since the 1990s, when I first moved to New York, and I remember seeing her walking her Pit Bull Rosie around the East Village. She had these beautiful arms and David Cassidy hair and the sort of swagger so many of the gay boys I knew wished we had. We all had crushes on her.
It is not just shameful for a contemporary American poet to use rhymes, it is unthinkable. It seems banal to him; he fears banality worse than anything, and therefore, he uses free verse – though free verse is no guarantee against banality.
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
It is a tremendous honor to be named poet laureate, but one that I find humbling as well, because it’s the kind of thing that makes me feel like – even as it’s been bestowed upon me – I must continue to live up to what it means… Being the younger laureate in the age of social media is a new challenge.
To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to us ordinary mortals.
A rich poet from Harvard has no sense in his mind, except the aesthetic.
For some odd reason, the expression ‘death of a poet’ always sounds somewhat more concrete than ‘life of a poet.’
I consider myself kind of a reporter – one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.
As a poet, I would always hear emcees come up to me and say, ‘Yo, you should rap,’ and I was like, ‘No.’ You know, the label was tough for me. I’m a poet. I was proud of that distinction between the two, not wanting to be the other.
A poet should always be ‘collaborating’ with his public, but this public, in the mass, cannot make itself heard, and he has to guess at its requirements and its criticisms.
Making films is about having absolute and foolish confidence; the challenge for all of us is to have the heart of a poet and the skin of an elephant.
No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.
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.
The only nice poets I’ve ever met were bad poets, and a bad poet is not a poet at all – ergo, I’ve never met a nice poet.
I wanted James Carville to never die. I wanted Dylan, the poet, to not die. I wanted to put these people in a place where they would be inviolate. It wasn’t enough to have a still life of them. I wanted to surround them with the lives they led.
If people connect me with the Romantics in general, they probably connect me most with Keats. But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.
According to them, the poet is confined to the provinces with his mouth broken on his own syllabic trapeze.
My working habit is to separate my aims as a painting from my aims as a poet. They come from very different places and ultimately lead me to very different places… I’ll leave what I mean by ‘places’ ambiguous.
A poet’s work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
When my father got the letter from Satyajit Ray saying I could work with him, I had to give up ‘Saat Hindustani.’ So I left for Calcutta and Amitabh got the role of the poet that I was supposed to play.
I got into an argument with someone because I said I think 2Pac will be regarded as a great poet. They said he was just a punk gangster. People said the same thing about Francois Villon, and he’s now considered the best French Romantic poet of all time.
I became aesthetically obsessed with language. And ‘literary artist’ – poet and novelist – is a calling. You are called to it the way preachers are called to preaching the gospel.
As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.
Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn’t suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.
I feel that I’m a poet first. Not only was poetry the first genre in which I wrote, it’s the genre that serves as the basis for my practice as a writer.
One can’t write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don’t like poetry.
I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven’t read.
I don’t think I would have written a combat novel if I had just had peacetime military training. I think, in fact, I probably would have remained a poet and just written a short story every now and then.
I became an electrician after high school. But I always had this thing in me to write. But it was always a little shameful. To say you were a poet was saying you were kind of crazy, and I carried that around for a long time. I still kind of carry that. And I think it might be true, actually.
My dad’s a photographer, and my sister is a writer and a poet. My little brother is a mandolin player – he’s a bluegrass musician. It’s always been a part of the family.
Jose Marti, known as ‘the Apostle of Cuban Independence,’ was an influential poet, journalist, and political theorist who became a symbol for the Cuban people’s bid for independence. The concepts of freedom, liberty, and self-determination feature prominently in his work.
I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It’s for others; it’s for others to use.
I don’t consider myself just a rapper or just a singer. I’m a music producer, lyricist. I’m a poet as well, and acting is also a part of big entertainment.
Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children’s future.
I never meant to be a full-time poet: I started out as a gardener, an ideal job for a poet because your head is left free.
I’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
I want young children to savor and enjoy Tagore like I did since I was a child. He was too great a poet of India to be kept limited to Bengal. Everybody should read and celebrate him.
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
Poetry itself is music. I’m just lucky that I can convert it into music. William Blake is my favorite poet of all time, and he said that he wasn’t quite familiar with the sounds of music. If so, he would have been a musician. All of his poems are all like songs, and that’s how I always try to start my thoughts.
My dad was the baby. When he was born they were already successful. They sent him to business school – he probably would have loved to have been a poet or a writer or something, and he was very creative.
I see myself as a songwriter and a poet.
We met with the poet Frank O’Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings.
The word poet literally means maker: anything which is not well made doesn’t exist.
I am a poet, and I speak poetically.
I always turn to Frank O’Hara and David Berman’s ‘Actual Air,’ which came out in 1999. He’s a poet I haven’t tired of.
A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
As his talent expands, some of his stories become pointed social commentary; some are surprisingly effective religious tracts, disguised as science fiction. Others still are nostalgic vignettes, but under it all is still Bradbury, the poet of 20th-century neurosis.
Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet’s abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.
Dream study impacts culture. We are put in touch with the inner poet who dreams. We hear our inner, subjective response to the outer world. That helps spiritualize our lives.
Theodore Roethke was a poet I was raised with so he has a lot of sentimental value for me.
This is just rap. I’m not trying to make people think I’m some sort of scientific wizard or inspirational poet.
I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.
Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.
My dad wanted to name me after Rainier Maria Rilke, the poet.
I had grown up as an Irish poet in a country where the distance between vision and imagination was not quite as wide as in some other countries.
Auden is a poet – no, the poet – of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas.
When the theater gates open, a mob pours inside, and it is the poet’s task to turn it into an audience.
Poets these days, like artists and composers, have won for themselves almost unlimited freedom. You can pass yourself off as a painter without being able to draw, as a composer without being conscious of key relationships, and as a poet without making yourself familiar with traditional verse forms.
It’s ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that’s going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I’m doing this crummy work.
Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.
My father is a poet. He’s a literary giant of this country – writes in Hindi – and also quite unique because he has a Ph.D. in English Literature. He taught at Harvard University, which is one of the most prominent universities in the country.
Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn’t know the way it’s going to come out, and at times, he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected; often his thought carries further than he reckoned.
I was much further along as a poet than as a songwriter, but the songs were getting more attention. They were doing what art is supposed to do, mixing it up with people.
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
Shakespeare is, after all, Britain’s greatest poet and dramatist.
The interesting thing is that you don’t often meet a poet who doesn’t have a sense of humour, and some of them do keep it out of their poems because they’re afraid of being seen as light versifiers.
What I want, when I write a poem, is no more than this: that it be preserved in some published form so that, in principle, someone, somewhere, will be able to find it and read it. That is all I need, as a poet, and that is the beauty, the luxury of my position. My lyric is mine and remains mine. Nobody can ruin it.
I made myself into a poet because it was the first thing I really loved. It was an act of will.
Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn’t think I could understand poetry; I didn’t think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.
There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.
‘Therefore’ is a word the poet must not know.
Rainer Maria Rilke was admittedly not a Dockers tagger, but a sort of European equivalent: a German poet – in many respects, a charlatan masquerading as a genius who turned out to be a genius.
Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
Oh, happy triumph of the poet! – to hear his verses wedded to sweet sounds, and warbled by the woman he loves!
The way to praise a poet is to write a poem.
Bob Altman got nothing from the TV series ‘M*A*S*H,’ and the royalties for the theme song went to his oldest son, Michael, who wrote it as a 15-year-old poet!
Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.
Then, of course, there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown, and one has to let them go because they’re just not making headway. But we have a very clear personal relationship with the authors.
If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.
With ‘Peradam’, the nature of the project was such that it was deeply immersed in spiritual concepts in India and is based on the works of French poet Rene Daumal.
A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation.
One time on a dive, I wound up drifting up in darkness surrounded by billions of photoluminescent creatures. It was a religious experience, one only a poet could do justice to.
The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.
The poet sees better than other mortals. I do not see things as they are, but according to my own subjective impression, and this makes life easier and simpler.
A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.
God is the perfect poet.
A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.
A poet could write volumes about diners, because they’re so beautiful. They’re brightly lit, with chrome and booths and Naugahyde and great waitresses. Now, it might not be so great in the health department, but I think diner food is really worth experiencing periodically.
If you want to be a poet, you can just write it on a napkin, and it’s the length of the napkin, I guess. But usually you decide you’ll rhyme it, or you’ll have a formula. In radio, that’s something called, ‘Close your eyes and listen.’
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.
Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet.
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
The generous Critic fann’d the Poet’s fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.
What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.
The exact day I became a poet was April 1, 1965, the day I bought my first typewriter.
I’m the happiest combination you can think of. I’m a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.
The musician – if he be a good one – finds his own perception prompted by the poet’s perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.
I really wanted to be a poet – until I realized that I really didn’t have what it took to be a poet.
And in a way, that’s been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet – sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a while. This happens to everybody.
I’ve always considered myself a poet in everything that I do, whether it’s photography or movie-making.
When I finished high school, I didn’t have much direction – I was a Deadhead kid who ended up bumming around London seeing a lot of theater. That’s where I saw the performance that made me want to act: Vanessa Redgrave doing ‘A Touch of the Poet.’
Biggie was to me the guy who was the best at painting the picture and making you visualize something, Pac was the best poet, and I feel like Jay Z is all of the above. Then Rick Ross is just, every line he spits is just perfect, and he’s one of my favorite MCs of all time.
I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet’s.
Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don’t mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber’s film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.
The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds – how many human aspirations are realized in their free, holiday-lives, and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!
I’m very fortunate in that my parents are artists. My mom is a brilliant poet… She still is a great visual artist. My dad is a jazz drummer… I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve had parents who supported and encouraged me and haven’t really questioned what I’m doing or asked me to question it.
I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.
I’m no parasite. I’m a poet who will bring honor and glory to his country.
I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet.
Is encouragement what the poet needs? Open question. Maybe he needs discouragement. In fact, quite a few of them need more discouragement, the most discouragement possible.
No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.
