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.
