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.
