Poets Quotes

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

I think the poets and musicians, they belong to everybody.

I’ve had trouble with criticism, I guess. It’s hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

I have seen so many poets who were famous, who won all sorts of prizes, disappear with their death. I write as good as I can and don’t try to turn that into some hope for a future that I could never know.

Being in the Sahitya Akademi, I did know quite a few poets – Jayanta Mahapatra, Sitakant Mahapatra, Sunil Gangopadhyay, to name a few. There were many poets.

I love art, and it plays a huge role in my life. It’s definitely one of my greatest joys, and I’m a bit fanatical about certain painters and poets and musicians and sculptors.

It’s difficult to get films made, especially films about poets.

You may be guided by the unending effort of poets and artists, biologists and psychiatrists to describe that irreplaceable and still mysterious emotion so essential to the human condition, but all the search engines in the universe cannot compete with the first kiss.

Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New England, and of English literature generally, as of another order. He is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald, the poet-seer.

Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together.

I can’t listen to rap music; it’s not my thing. They say that they’re the modern poets: of course they are, but it’s not for me.

Revolution is glorified by intellectuals, apotheosized by poets, sanctified by visionaries, and bled white by politicians.

In the ’70s, the newspaper guild managed to get people paid what they were worth, but the reporters suddenly became middle class. It’s much more respectable, more uptight, and everyone speaks in guarded tones. And the writing isn’t as good. We always had guys who were failed poets and failed novelists who did it to eat.

Some of my favorite poets had a tremendous sense of whimsy, so it’s a writing style I guess I admire.

Poets are born, not paid.

I think every person either inherits or eventually makes up their own idea of what they are and who they are and what caused the world to be, and it seems to me that these stories of creation myth, adopted by different cultures – most of them are less insightful than the stories made up by individual poets and writers.

Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.

There was a time when poetry often made its way to vinyl; take a deep dive, for example, into the beat poets’ countercultural albums of the 1950s to ’80s.

I didn’t know any poets growing up in Kansas.

Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.

The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves – although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals – its philosophers, its poets and its artists.

Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.

I can’t look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Defeat furnishes good material to the poets and the artists, but none of us care to have the glory of the conquered apply to us.

Out of the thousands who are known or who want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes, hanging around the sacred precincts, trying to look like the real thing.

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

It is what the poets of Ireland used to be saying, that every brave man, good at fighting, and every man that could do great deeds and not be making much talk about them, was of the Sons of the Gael; and that every skilled man that had music and that did enchantments secretly, was of the Tuatha de Danaan.

Don’t call my lyrics poetry. It’s an insult to real poets.

I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say, your professional poets, I mean there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

Poets often are dealing with history and are thinking about the way history moves across us, and we move in it.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

It’s been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they’ve got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all.

I envy poets because nobody ever asks them if it’s true or false.

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.

Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius.

Romanians have a particular love for poetry and have a beautiful, vivid language. The poets they love are not versifiers like Vadim Tudor, but genuinely complex mystical souls like Mircea Cartarescu.

Rumi, who is one of the greatest Persian poets, said that the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.

All kids, when they go to school, are pretty good artists and dancers and singers and poets. All that gets buried, basically through being educated, or brainwashed.

I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.

Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.

Latino patriots have served and fought in every war. They are artists, dancers, singers, poets and journalists, teachers and scientists. More and more Latinos are becoming entrepreneurs and businesspeople, contributing to the wealth and economic well-being of the nation.

Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.

I’m probably much more influenced by film-makers and painters than I am by other songwriters or poets.

My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country’s finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.

I was offered ‘Pretty Woman.’ I was offered ‘Big’ and ‘Dead Poets Society.’ But what was important to me in those years was to make movies, to make these Albert Brooks movies.

There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.

A nation’s poets are its true owners; and by the stroke of the pen they convey the title-deeds of its real possessions to strangers and aliens.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

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.

Pleasure has ever more been represented by poets and by painters as clothed in perpetual smiles and adorned with the richest jewels; and in real life, we have known many who, allured by her deceptions, blandishments, and hollow but showy temptations, have followed as she pointed until ruin has befallen them.

I’m a teacher, so much of what I’m doing remains in the abstract. But I also support a lot of educational initiatives that support kids to really get out there and work hard in their communities. But I also think that we need poets in our country to inspire.

It is possible that Mount Olympus may have supplied the poets with the hint for saying that Jupiter obtained the kingdom of heaven, because Olympus is the common name both of the mountain and of heaven.

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

If you read the poets of the 19th century in Latin America, you would see that Havana or Mexico City or Buenos Aires are incredibly modern and global cities that they were not. And eventually they became real, and they became real because people read these books and tried to live in a better world.

Has the painter not always gone to an art school, or at least to an established master, for instruction? And the composer, the sculptor, the architect? Then why not the writer? Good poets, like good hybrid corn, are both born and made.

I’m ashamed to admit that I very seldom read poetry, even though many of my friends are poets.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life, I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

At this moment, by an undeserved stroke of fortune, I am the direct voice of the poets of my race and the indirect voice for the noble Spanish and Portuguese tongues.

The phenomenon of Instagram poets – who are also, to be fair, Tumblr poets and Pinterest poets – has been one of the more surprising side-effects of the selfie age.

But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it’s no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

I am happy that I could collaborate with poets like O.N.V. Kurup and Yusufali Kechery in my career; they wrote meaningful lyrics, which made my songs last longer.

In the spring of 1854, some of my publications persuaded King Maximilian II of Bavaria to offer me, at the suggestion of Emanuel Geibel, a position in Munich with an annual salary of 1000 guilders, to take part in his so-called symposia, weekly soirees at which scholars and poets were gathered.

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.

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.

I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie.

The American public does not know poets exist.

I grew up in Banaras on Kabir and other Hindi poets and then I got introduced to Faiz, Hasrat Mohani, Allama Iqbal and Majaaz. They took me to another facet of literature and drama.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

Poets are not meant to be in competition.

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.

A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren’t in it for the money. William Blake – only his first book was legitimately published.

While I don’t satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I’m terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that’s true about many of us.

The way I mainly use the Internet is keeping in touch with poets that live far away. My main interest is contemporary American poets and some Spanish language poets, and I keep in touch with their work through either their websites or email.

It makes me happy to meet other poetry fans. Especially when they recommend poets I’m not familiar with.

Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they’re more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven’t the least idea of where poetry is going.

When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart’s the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

I feel very connected to poets across the country.

The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business. The greater the ‘genius’ of the personage, the greater the profit.

It is important for poets and writers today to know their shortcomings, and be able to edit their own work as well as reject them if they are not up to their standards.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

The lovely daisy, so justly celebrated by European poets, is not a native of our soil; we know it well, however, by cultivation in our gardens and green houses; besides, we are disposed to remember it for the sake of those who have sung its praises in immortal verse.

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don’t enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.

A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.

For me rappers and dancers are poets and artists and often times the most interesting performances are given by them.

I hear poets complaining: ‘We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that.’

Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.

I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

I did sketch comedy with a troupe at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

Poets don’t draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

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.

The way I process things, they way I express myself, is in comics, just as poets process things that they are trying to understand.

Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.

When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.

Poets are supposed to be underappreciated, don’t you know? There is always a strange reaction to those who become successful in their own lifetime, and so I always felt lucky that I made the living I did out of it.

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.

I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I’ve ended up doing that myself.

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.

One of the things women poets have been engaged in – among the other things they’ve been doing – is revising parts of the poetic self. Re-examining notions of the authority within the poem, and of the poem.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

I think ‘Dead Poets’ was probably my favorite, just to get started with the idea of doing a movie that people treated as more than a movie.

I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the ’60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop.

One of my very favourite poets was a Massachusetts poet named Robert Lowell.

Well, it’s a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it’s no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

I’m into the lyrical side of rap. I listen to some old Eminem songs and think, ‘Wow, he’s a genius.’ He’s one of the greatest poets of our time. Even when he’s out of control, like on ‘Cold Wind Blows,’ it’s incredible.

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.

Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there’s been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived… Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.

If we’re gonna progress as a people we are going to realise that, as one of my favourite poets says, the other is a lie. There are no other people. Race is a social construct.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

There’s a reason poets often say, ‘Poetry saved my life,’ for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul’s suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.

Science is not addressed to poets.

Poetry itself hasn’t been well served by poets who fled to the margins.

The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind.

Another one of the old poets, whose name has escaped my memory at present, called Truth the daughter of Time.

When I met Bob Dylan, I was definitely impressed. This guy had come from the American folk world, but he was very schooled in poetry, too. He’d studied the Beat poets, of course. I grew up in the British bohemian scene. Dylan grew up in the American bohemian scene. So I was very pleased to meet such a guy.

Poetry fills clubs, halls and venues. Poets and poems can talk to the deepest feelings and to the silliest. It can be like stand-up or rock music. It can be intimate, it can be pubic.

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.

I love Black poets. I love that as a Black girl, I get to participate in that legacy. So that’s Yusef Komunyakaa, Sonia Sanchez, Tracy K. Smith, Phillis Wheatley.

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.

Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

Sylvia Plath, Rumi, there’s a lot of spoken word poets who do a really incredible job putting their spoken work into page poetry – that’s what I strive to do.

Let the poets cry themselves to sleep, and all their tearful words will turn back into steam.

I still believe many poets begin in fear and hope: fear that the poetic past will turn out to be a monologue rather than a conversation. And hope that their voice can be heard as that past turns into a future.

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

Modern storytellers are the descendants of an immense and ancient community of holy people, troubadours, bards, griots, cantadoras, cantors, traveling poets, bums, hags, and crazy people.

‘Ageism,’ or whatever you want to call it, is a very English phenomenon. You don’t get it too much in many other cultures. And no one says it about authors or poets or filmmakers. ‘Oh, they’re too old to make films or write books.’

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

All poets’ wives have rotten lives Their husbands look at them like knives.

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

The only nice poets I’ve ever met were bad poets, and a bad poet is not a poet at all – ergo, I’ve never met a nice poet.

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that’s a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.

At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism.

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

I’m an amalgam of the 19th-century romantics and the beat poets.

The south produced statesmen and soldiers, planters and doctors and lawyers and poets, but certainly no engineers and mechanics. Let Yankees adopt such low callings.

Many men of science and poets have in their own manner, by various ways and means, and aided by others, sought unceasingly to create a more tolerable world for everyone.

There is no real agreement among scholars as to whether Homer and Hesiod were contemporaries or whether Homer came a hundred or so years later or earlier. How could there be, given that both poets recited and sang in an oral culture.

The historical legacy of ‘The Best American Poetry’ is they’ve had very few editors who were not white. They’ve had very few instances where they’ve selected poems by non-white poets.

We will certainly see teachers, journalists, artists and poets in space. Whatever it takes to the be the best is what it will take to get you into space.

Many performance poets seem to believe that yelling a poem makes it comprehensible. They are wrong.

I’ve been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

The scientist and engineers who are building the future need the poets to make sense of it.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

Many poets write books. They’ll tell you: Well, I’ve got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.

When I first got to Motown, Smokey was already a fixture there. To me, he is one of the greatest songwriters and poets, so anything they ask me to do for Smokey is going to get a yes.

Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence.

Even the greatest poets, I think, cannot quite get to the places that music can get to in the human – I was gonna say mind, but it’s actually the entire body. It somehow seems to infuse the entire body.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune’s darlings.

Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. ‘The Anxiety of Influence’, published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other.

There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don’t think I can imitate it, but there’s a density to it that I think I’m always trying to push towards in English.

And thus it was that I started to wonder why Robert Burns is so important to us. We have other poets, and other writers, and other heroes, yet we do not afford them the veneration that we afford to Robert Burns.

Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.

It is strange, how quickly people want to obligate their poets, as it were, on the exile.

I was not really aware of the dystopian genre before I read ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ Many poets as well, like John Donne and Emily Dickinson, would be the influences; I specialized in Emily Dickinson at university. Both of those poets have really interesting ways of looking at life and death.

I know who the great poets are.

My sisters were going out with artists and poets, and eventually it was the creative world which attracted me.

I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.

So much inspires me. People living their lives with courage, beauty of all kinds, nature in all its aspects, people I love and people I hardly know, and, of course, other poets.

Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot.

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.

I don’t know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets – the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from.

I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I’ll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.

I had a country upbringing in a predominantly Maori community, and that contrasted with a very multi-cultured arts community in the Aro Valley in Wellington: growing up around a lot of theatre and poets and writers and stuff.

I’m inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I’m good at it.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

But there is some way in which poets believe that and this is dangerous, too believe that their calling gives them a certain freedom. A certain freedom to live in a free way.

I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.

Of poets I put Virgil first – he was greatest.

Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors.

My father, George, has also affected the choices in my life regarding films. I like films that take chances or say something different or experiment. Growing up with him, I was surrounded by different artists – not just actors or film-makers but cartoonists, poets, writers.

When I used to listen to the poets in other languages and the kind of appreciation they received, I wanted to be there on the dais and experience that myself.

There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous – and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.

Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it’s a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography – Apollinaire’s ‘Calligrammes,’ that sort of thing.

I’d photographed musicians before but this was different. Syd was very charismatic, and he had the aura of a poete maudit, which made him the perfect subject for me – I realised that rock n’ rollers were the modern equivalent of all the poets I was so enamoured with.

Travellers, like poets, are mostly an angry race: by falling into a daily fit of passion, I proved to the governor and his son, who were profuse in their attentions, that I was in earnest.

Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.

Artists – musicians, painters, writers, poets – always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.

From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

I absorbed the vinyl of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Jack Elliott, to Michael McClure and then into the Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg. At campus, we were absorbing that stuff. We looked to America.

Dabbling with Tagore was always scary. It happens with masters, with contemporary poets you know their vibes and their meaning. Tagore was different; his aura and the feel of his language was different.

Poets are Damned… but See with the Eyes of Angels.

I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate, and there are some critics who have no ear for it. An irresponsible critic can do a lot of psychic damage, but eventually, they don’t affect your work.

The 1960s was a period when writers in the West began to be aware of the extraordinary eloquence and popular attraction of the Russian poets such as Yevtushenko and Voznesensky – oppositional figures who could draw crowds. The Russian poets recited from memory as a matter of course.

But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.

When I got to Grinnell College, I was part of the black turtleneck sweater and Camel cigarette crowd of poets and writers.

But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them.

If sexual intercourse, as the poets tell us, began in 1963, it was another decade and a half before the American political system began to take notice.

New voices in an old art – and women poets have been that for much more than a century – do not diminish the art through the category. They enrich it. They renew it with common quandaries of craft and innovation. The category simply allows the quandaries to be seen more clearly.

The sound of water is worth more than all the poets’ words.

Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.

My father would take me to auditions and put me in the room right in the corner because he was watching me; he couldn’t get a babysitter. He’d be at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the LES until four in the morning, trying to tell his story and using his craft, but because he had a kid that didn’t let him stop.

I’m inspired by the poets, so I’m always going to give in that direction, rather than in any other. It’s the making of me… and also the downfall of me.

She knows more of love than the poets can say, and her eyes offer something that won’t go away.

Most poets in their youth begin in adolescent sadness. I find it more rewarding to end in gladness.

For this reason poets and artists developed the doctrine of Art for Art’s Sake. The community did not appear to need them, so, tit for tat, they did not need the community. This being granted, it was no longer necessary or even desirable to make one’s poetry either intelligible or sympathetic to the community.

Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions.

Most poets are elitist dregs more concerned with proving their skill with a dictionary than communicating ideas with impact.

American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.

No campaign of the First World War better justifies the poets’ view of the conflict as futile and pitiless than Gallipoli.

I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.

Whilst in Prussia poets only speak of the love of country as one of the dearest of all human affections, here there is no man who does not feel, and describe with rapture, how much he loves his country.

I truly hate marketing promotions, and I don’t at all approve of encouraging wannabe poets to write bad poetry.

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers – encouraging them to die.

We know there are poets who are chosen: by what or whom, we no more know than what lies beyond our final breath, or what caused a certain action which resulted in the fulfillment or the desecration and collapse of what we most cared for in life.

The community of poets I belong to is not as close as it used to be, if only for the fact that our lives have become busier: jobs, children, and the like.

I wrote some serious stuff in high school; however, I hadn’t been exposed to any of the major poets, not even the minor ones… I read nothing but Sara Teasdale.

For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.