Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Poet Quotes from famous authors such as Robert Fitzgerald, William Kingdon Clifford, Oliver Goldsmith, Simone Veil, Beatrice Wood. Let’s look at these pieces of wisdom. We definitely have something to learn from them!
1
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.
2
There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture – that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.
3
Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.
4
The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.
5
A rich poet from Harvard has no sense in his mind, except the aesthetic.
6
It is tiring to be Turkish. The country is badly polarised, bitterly politicized. Every writer, journalist, poet knows that because of an article, a novel, an interview, a poem or a tweet you can be sued, put on trial, even arrested. Self-censorship is widespread.
7
Married or unmarried, young or old, poet or worker, you are still a dreamer, and will one time know, and feel, that your life is but a dream.
8
I was writing poems when I was young, you know, because my father was a poet, so it was absolutely normal to follow my father.
9
An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses about the truths of the mind or of things.
10
The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, ‘A civilization is judged only in its decline.’ That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players.
11
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.
12
In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.
13
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.
14
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.
15
Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.
16
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.
17
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.’
18
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.
19
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.
20
A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.
21
I’m Dominique Crenn. I’m a chef, entrepreneur, artist, poet, human being. I have three restaurants in San Francisco: Atelier Crenn, Bar Crenn and Petit Crenn.
22
Working alone on a poem, a poet is of all artists the most free. The poem can be written with a modicum of technology, and can be published, in most cases, quite cheaply.
23
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.
24
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.
25
I’ve always tried to be a poet more than anything else. I mean, professional musicians die.
26
Theodore Roethke was a poet I was raised with so he has a lot of sentimental value for me.
27
The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.
28
A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.
29
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.
30
The poet’s expression of joy conceals his despair at not having found the reality of joy.
31
A poet ought not to pick nature’s pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
32
What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
33
The power of daring anything their fancy suggest, as always been conceded to the painter and the poet.
34
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.
35
My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.
36
The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
37
My mom is Irish. She is a poet and a humanitarian who believed in ensuring that people around her had a better life.
38
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
39
This is just rap. I’m not trying to make people think I’m some sort of scientific wizard or inspirational poet.
40
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.
41
My name was originally John Collins, but I just didn’t think it had the flair I needed. I found out the poet laureate of Poland was named Krasinski and so it seemed like a shoe-in for show business.
42
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.
43
A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
44
Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.
45
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.
46
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.
47
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.
48
I had the title poet, and maybe I was one for a while. Also, the title singer was kindly accorded me, even though I could barely carry a tune.
49
You will find the poet who wrings the heart of the world, or the foremost captain of his time, driving a bargain or paring a potato, just as you would do.
50
I don’t fit into the age, race, or class of a bestselling poet.
51
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.
52
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.
53
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.
54
It’s the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.
55
I made myself into a poet because it was the first thing I really loved. It was an act of will.
56
I am a poet; I am not a worker. I need to be free.
57
Anyone who holds a pen these days thinks he or she is a poet.
58
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.
59
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.
60
I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.
61
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.
62
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.
63
The best poems come from the world, go through the poet, and go back in to the world.
64
Anybody who instantly goes from being a poet and a graduate student to being a public figure has to be in a state of shock. First people want to praise you, and then they want to attack you. No one can prepare you for it.
65
It always has been and forever will be impossible for slavery or any kind or form of injustice to produce a great poet.
66
I’m the weird poet who has paid her dues in the experimental world for 30 or 40 years.
67
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.
68
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.
69
I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.
70
‘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.’
71
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.
72
There’s a part of me that wishes I’d never said one single solitary word on any subject publicly. Then I could have been the tortured poet, and there’s so much mileage in that. But it’s too late to stop now.
73
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.
74
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.
75
Are you really going to see Lewis? One of the few people it’s worth getting excited over, I think. I know he is a good poet. I daresay he never heard of me, but I wish you would tell him that his work is the joy of my life.
76
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.
77
And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.
78
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.
79
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.
80
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.
81
A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.
82
I read a very romantic book when I was young, when I was in college: Rilke’s ‘Letters to a Young Poet.’ And I’ve always felt that if you are in any kind of an artistic, creative endeavor, and you feel there’s something else you can do for a living and be happy, I think you should do something else.
83
The relation between a poet and audience is really insignificant. What matters is the poet is hearing something that he is broadcasting. And whether there is anybody with a receiver isn’t the reason he does it. He hopes there is somebody receiving it.
84
I wanted to learn Latin and Greek and become a poet and acquire power over language. I only understand this clearly in retrospect, that my ability to study came from a hunger to learn all the resources of articulation.
85
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.
86
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.
87
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.
88
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.
89
In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don’t care about my cinema. In Europe, they don’t know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!
90
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher’s the poet’s equal there.
91
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.
92
I earn more than I thought I would when I became a poet.
93
I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.
94
Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry’s expressiveness.
95
I’m a poet.
96
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.
97
I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet’s.
98
Technological prescience in science fiction usually requires an author with luck. Societal prescience requires a poet.
99
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.
100
Once I stop being a citizen of the U.S.S.R., I will not stop being a Russian poet.
101
Jesus of Nazareth was a poet, no less than a prophet, of pre-eminent genius.
102
At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.
103
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.
104
The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
105
None merits the name of Creator but God and the poet.
106
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.
107
You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.
108
In truth, every creation of the mind is first of all ‘poetic’ in the proper sense of the word; and inasmuch as there exists an equivalence between the modes of sensibility and intellect, it is the same function that is exercised initially in the enterprises of the poet and the scientist.
109
I think of the Tamil poet Subrahmanya Bharati every day, and he is an inspiration in my musical creations.
110
According to them, the poet is confined to the provinces with his mouth broken on his own syllabic trapeze.
111
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
112
To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.
113
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.
114
By writing… in the language of his society, a poet takes a large step toward it. It is society’s job to meet him halfway, that is, to open his book and read it.
115
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.
116
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
117
To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to us ordinary mortals.
118
How does a poet teach himself or herself? I think chiefly by imitation, chiefly by practising it as a deliberate technical exercise often. Translation, imitation, those were my methods anyway.
119
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.
120
Basho is the great poet of Japan, writing in the second half of the 17th century, but his work is still incredibly fresh.
121
I had a very humane, what the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova would probably have called ‘vegetarian,’ experience of migration. It involved planes and trains – the actual compartments of passenger trains – and not grueling walking and riding on the roofs of trains.
122
The eyes of a poet discover in each person a unique and irreplaceable humanity. While arrogant intellect seeks to control and manipulate the world, the poetic spirit bows with reverence before its mysteries.
123
I began as a journalist for my pocketbook and a poet for my soul.
124
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.
125
It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.
126
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
127
I believe the poet shouldn’t be in the poem at all except as a lens or as ears.
128
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.
129
If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
130
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.
131
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.
132
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
133
I think that that’s why artists make art – it is difficult to put into words unless you are a poet. What it takes is being open to the flow of universal creativity. The Zen artists knew this.
134
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.
135
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.
136
A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
137
I’m a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.
138
A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.
139
As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.
140
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.
141
Everyone his own cinematographer. His own stream-of-consciousness e-mail poet. His own nightclub DJ. His own political columnist. His own biographer of his top-10 friends!
142
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.’
143
When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man.
144
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
145
The generous Critic fann’d the Poet’s fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.
146
There’s this poet named Walter Benton, I really like his stuff. He always uses landscapes as a metaphor for the female body.
147
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.
148
Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.
149
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.
150
Auden is a poet – no, the poet – of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas.
151
Of course, I have to consider that I’ve written a lot of prose, but I do in my heart think of myself as being originally, and still primarily, a poet.
152
I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.
153
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.
154
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.
155
Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish.
156
With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.
157
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
158
My task as poet is close to me.
159
I was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about!
160
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.
161
The poet is someone, I think, who’s interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.
162
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.
163
I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.
164
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.
165
I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
166
The poet’s other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.
167
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.
168
My dad was a poet. He saw the world through unique glasses, with simplicity, spirituality, and humor.
169
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.
170
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
171
From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.
172
One can’t write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don’t like poetry.
173
One of my favorite artists is Tom Waits, whom most people think of as a wonderful singer-songwriter and a great poet. I certainly think of him that way, but I also know him as a terrific actor. You know, that persona that he puts on when he’s doing his music comes from being an actor, figuring out a persona.
174
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.
175
I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter – or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then.
176
As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
177
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.
178
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.
179
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.
180
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
181
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
182
Every great architect is – necessarily – a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
183
Shakespeare is, after all, Britain’s greatest poet and dramatist.
184
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.
185
I do play tennis in shorts, I have driven across the length and breadth of the country from Khardung La pass to Kanyakumari in my beloved Ambassador car, and I did compile my 100 Lyrics book, inspired by Lyrics by Sting. I don’t subscribe to any definition of an Urdu poet.
186
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.
187
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.
188
Being identified as a poet in France or Denmark or India one is greeted with gracious respect.
189
For some odd reason, the expression ‘death of a poet’ always sounds somewhat more concrete than ‘life of a poet.’
190
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.
191
I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.
192
I’m using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I’m an American poet.
193
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.
194
Viereck became a historian, specializing in modern Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.
195
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.
196
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.
197
‘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.
198
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.
199
When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.
200
I didn’t feel like I was allowed to be a songwriter. I thought I had to be a really intelligent lyricist, like a poet.
201
I’m a poet first and foremost, before the modelling.
202
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.
203
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
204
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.
205
None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
206
Nas’ longevity comes from him having strong lyrical value in his songs, him being more like a poet and improving over time.
207
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.
208
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
209
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.
210
The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical – their data are in the way they sound. A poet’s biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.
211
I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.
212
As fire kindled by fire, so is the poet’s mind kindled by contact with a brother poet.
213
Every dude in your high school wasn’t striving to be the best poet because then he’d get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.
214
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.
215
A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
216
I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven’t read.
217
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.
218
I am a poet, and I speak poetically.
219
I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what’s really on my mind.
220
I’m uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem.
221
I’m a big fan of the poet Mary Jo Salter, and although she doesn’t need to be discovered at all – she’s widely admired and anthologized and extremely accomplished – I wish she were a household name.
222
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.
223
Oh, happy triumph of the poet! – to hear his verses wedded to sweet sounds, and warbled by the woman he loves!
224
As regards literary culture, it fascinates me that it has been so resilient to the Union. For example, when T.S. Eliot wanted to become poet in these lands, it wasn’t as an English poet, it was an Anglian poet he wanted to be.
225
I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.
226
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
227
A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.
228
I wouldn’t be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, ‘What a peculiar thing to say about this work of mine.’
229
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?
230
Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.
231
I’m the happiest combination you can think of. I’m a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.
232
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.
233
To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.
234
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.
235
To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.
236
The great poet is a great artist. He is painter and sculptor. The greatest pictures and statues have been painted and chiseled with words. They outlast all others.
237
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.
238
It’s important to immerse myself in one thing at a time to do it well, but I could never do one thing only. I will always be a poet and a singer, because I’m interested in bending genres and pushing boundaries of what is considered a poem, what is considered a song.
239
I was a piano player before I was a poet.
240
There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, ‘Truth is the daughter of Time.’
241
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.
242
One of my very favourite poets was a Massachusetts poet named Robert Lowell.
243
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.
244
In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don’t understand.
245
But here’s the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.
246
A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.
247
A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.
248
They think I’m going to be a schoolteacher but I’m going to be a poet.
249
My dedication to trying to be a poet started very, very young, and I was very well encouraged by good teachers and by older friends and so on, so I think it is a benediction, and I also think it is a calling, a duty.
250
For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that’s a high title to claim.
251
All a poet can do today is warn.
252
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.
253
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.
254
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.
255
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.
256
As a poet, Will Rogers just had this natural conversational style.
257
People can’t see that if I had not been a poet, I could never have had such success as a traveler.
258
If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven.
259
What made me a comedian was that I wasn’t really a songwriter, I was more of a poet.
260
Noel Gallagher is a poet, and Liam is a town crier.
261
We are proud to have with us the poet lariat of Chicago.
262
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.
263
I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.
264
I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry.
265
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.
266
The poet complains or points out the discontent that lies at the heart of man, the individual man, and how can that be redeemed?
267
It was among farmers and potato diggers and old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul.
268
The antagonism between the poet and the politician has generally been evident in all cultures.
269
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.
270
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.
271
I’m a fiction writer, and I do write essays, but I am not a poet. And I absolutely reject the phrase ‘woman writer’ as anti-feminist. I wrote an essay about this as far back as 1977, at the height of the neo-feminist movement.
272
I would like to be a philosopher in ancient Athens and a poet in ancient China.
273
At the end of the day, Johnny Cash was a poet.
274
I do believe that a poet would possess a stronger intuitive sense of phrasing with a rock song. There is a way to tap into the emotions of an audience simply by the cross of a certain phrase, even a single word, against a certain chord.
275
If everybody became a poet the world would be much better. We would all read to each other.
276
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.
277
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.
278
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.
279
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.
280
When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
281
The first thing you see in my hallway is a large 18th-century bust of Milton, who stares at me as I watch TV and reminds me of the grave and committed role of the poet. Although he was blind, Milton had one of the most unswerving gazes of all English poets.
282
And muse on Nature with a poet’s eye.
283
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.
284
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.
285
That’s a wonderful change that’s taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.
286
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.
287
At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.
288
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.
289
I love Roald Dahl, Sharon Olds, Nizar Qabbani, who is a poet, and Junot Diaz.
290
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.
291
Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist.
292
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.
293
I think Don Henley is a brilliant contemporary rock writer. He would have been a fabulous poet if he weren’t a musician. He was a literary major, and not only that – he’s gifted with a brilliant voice. To me, Don could sing the New York City Yellow Pages and I’d buy it. I just love the sound of his voice.
294
Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.
295
In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?
296
I’m not a journalist; I’m a poet.
297
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.
298
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
299
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.
300
A paranoiac like a poet, is born, not made.
301
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.
302
I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.
303
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.
304
One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
305
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.
306
I’ve never read a political poem that’s accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
307
In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems.
308
The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind him too; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather more strictly compelling.
309
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.
310
Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.
311
‘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.
312
Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.
313
‘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.
314
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.
315
I’d say my artistic bent definitely came from my father, who was a trial lawyer. And if you’re smart, you know that a trial lawyer isn’t that different from an actor. He was a poet as well.
316
To a poet, it’s quite ruinous to have a poem distorted, out of shape, or squeezed, shall we say, into this tiny screen. But I’m not sure big digital companies are sensitive to the needs of poets.
317
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.
318
No bad man can be a good poet.
319
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.
320
By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been.
321
Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.
322
I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
323
Potter is jealous of potter, and craftsman of craftsman; and the poor have a grudge against the poor, and the poet against the poet.
324
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.
325
When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn’t worth reading.
326
‘Therefore’ is a word the poet must not know.
327
I want to be remembered as a poet, a peacemaker, and a philosopher who played.
328
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.
329
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.
330
The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.
331
You can say, ‘I am a poet, rock-climbing shaman, and my name is Hiawatha Moonbeam,’ and people in America will say, ‘Hey, that’s great. All power to you, man’.
332
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!
333
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.
334
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.’
335
I’m tired of being this solemn poet of the masses, the enigma shrouded in a mystery.
336
I shall, in due time, be a Poet.
337
All that I am is me. So I’m not really a poet or a writer or an actor or an activist; I’m me, and these are things that I do.
338
I’ve written on public matters, but I don’t understand how anyone could tout me as a possible poet laureate when I wrote a poem on the abdication of King Charles III or about the sex life of the Royals… anybody who knew my work would know I’m not a contender.
339
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.
340
My dad wanted to name me after Rainier Maria Rilke, the poet.
341
How much money you get, depends on lots of extraneous things. It depends on how good you are at turning poetry into a marketable product, which is something it was never supposed to be. That’s why many people suppose that the better the poet you are the lower your income should be, and that’s probably true.
342
A poet’s cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.
343
I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.
344
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.
345
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.
346
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.
347
I love the 19th-century idea of the flaneur, the poet wandering through the streets.
348
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.
349
I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.
350
I do not want to be bored listening to music that is muffled and known only to the poet himself.
351
The poet’s spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth.
352
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.
353
Steve Allen was on Johnny Carson one time – I looked for it, but I couldn’t find it – and he read the lyrics to ‘Hot Stuff’ by Donna Summer like a poet. He read them very seriously. I was maybe 8, but it killed me.
354
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.
355
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.
356
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.
357
To be a poet, it’s a challenge to do it in poverty, to do it in wealth. To do it in the academy, to do it in a relationship where you’re happy. Everything changes the game. To do it in the awkward state of love, despair, dying. You just have to work it.
358
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.
359
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.
360
The poet is like the earth’s shadow. The sun moves, and the poet writes something down.
361
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.
362
If I am not mistaken, it was a British poet who said that ‘no one is properly dressed unless he wears a smile.’
363
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.
364
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.
365
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.
366
The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
367
My father is a poet, my stepmother is a poet, and so I always had encouragement as a child to write.
368
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.
369
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.
370
Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.
371
I am the poet of the high wire – I never do stunts; I do theatrical performances.
372
I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.
373
One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes.
374
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.
375
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.
376
American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
377
As the poet said, ‘Only God can make a tree,’ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.
378
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
379
When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn’t interested any longer. That’s very astonishing.
380
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.
381
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.
382
Every dad who loves his daughter is not going to want her to go with the penniless slacker loser poet bum, when she could go out with someone who’s successful.
383
I’m not a poet. So the writing process is a difficult one for me.
384
To me, seeing a really great comedian is a bit like watching a musician or a poet.
385
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.
386
An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.
387
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.
388
The Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes wrote that beauty is fundamental. Well, with the poet’s permission, so is courage.
389
If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.
390
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.
391
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.
392
What’s really funny about being National Youth Poet Laureate is that not everyone even knows it exists.
393
The poet does not know – often he will never know – whom he really writes for.
394
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.
395
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
396
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.
397
I’ve always considered myself a poet in everything that I do, whether it’s photography or movie-making.
398
A man may be variously accomplished, and yet be a feeble poet.
399
Dickinson is my hero because she was a joker, because she would never explain, because as a poet she confronted pain, dread and death, and because she was capable of speaking of those matters with both levity and seriousness. She’s my hero because she was a metaphysical adventurer.
400
The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.
401
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.
402
Is the biographer an artist who can and should exist on equal terms with the dramatist, fiction writer and poet? The short and robust answer is, ‘Certainly not.’
403
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.
404
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.
405
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.
406
The eye is the notebook of the poet.
407
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.
408
Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.
409
There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.
410
My brother told me I was going to be a poet. I had a good brother. He did a lot of good brotherly work.
411
As a poet and a teacher, I read all the time. I know I read slowly. I like reading, but I don’t read any more than I have to.
412
Wamiqa means the goddess of wind; my dad is a poet and writer in Punjabi and Gabbi is his pseudonym.
413
The man of science is nothing if not a poet gone wrong.
414
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.
415
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.
416
I’m really clear about what my life mission is now. There’s no more depression or lethargy, and I feel like I’ve returned to the athlete I once was. I’m integrating all the parts of me – jock, musician, writer, poet, philosopher – and becoming stronger as a result.
417
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
418
Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.
419
The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
420
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.
421
I hate being called poet/dramatist/translator/director. ‘Poet’ covers it all for me.
422
I saw an amazing film when I was 16 called ‘Slam’. It’s about a spoken-word poet. Saul Williams is in it.
423
The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.
424
No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.
425
I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.
426
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.
427
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.
428
The Greeks, those originators of the intellectual life, fixed for us the idea of the poet. He was a divine man; more sacred than the priest, who was at best an intermediary between men and the gods, but in the poet the god was present and spoke.
429
I just love working with Eminem. He’s just one of my favorite rappers, and his lyrics – he’s a true poet, and I enjoy that about him.
430
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?
431
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.
432
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.
433
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.
434
My father was an amateur oil painter, so some of his oil paintings were on our walls. There was one above the piano of a famous Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, playing an instrument known as a bandura. I remember that one kind of resonated with me; it was always central in the living room.
435
I was actually sacked from my first job. It was at a workshop for a short film this poet had written, about when she used to work in a strip club. After the first week, I was told not to come back.
436
I have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.
437
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.
438
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.
439
To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.
440
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.
441
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.
442
I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.
443
I wanted to be a poet. I wrote from ages 15 to 22, but I left it because I discovered, and fell in love with, cinema.
444
A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.
445
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!
446
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.
447
A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
448
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.
449
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.
450
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.
451
I believe God is a poet; every religion in our history was made of poems and songs, and not a few of them had books attached.
452
The good poet sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race.
453
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.
454
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.
