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.
