Quotes About Poet

The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.

I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

I think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much as on historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I think that' for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.

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.

A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.

How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.

I'd rather be a great bad poet than a good bad poet.

Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.

I suppose every poet has his own private mythology. Maybe he's unaware of it. People tell me that I have evolved a private mythology of tigers, of blades, of labyrinths, and I"m unaware of the fact this is so. My readers are finding it all the time. But I think perhaps that is the duty of poet.

The difference between a poet and a philosopher is that the poet sees logically and describes basically the beauty whereas the philosopher defines the basics and shows the beauty of logics.

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool, But you yourself may serve to show it, That every fool is not a poet.

I certainly was surprised to be named Poet Laureate of this far-out city on the left side of the world, and I gratefully accept, for as I told the Mayor, "How could I refuse?" I'd rather be Poet Laureate of San Francisco than anywhere because this city has always been a poetic center, a frontier for free poetic life, with perhaps more poets and more poetry readers than any city in the world.

A poet is a poet, whether he rides in a Ford or on a donkey; a sage is a sage, whether he plays golf in New Jersey or bathes in the Ganges, or prays in the desert; and a fool is a fool, whether he be a maharaja or a president of a post-war republic.

I can't think of any poet-recluses outside of one dead Jeffers. [Robinson Jeffers] The rest of them want to slobber over each other and hug each other. It appears to me that I am the last of the poet-recluses.

A poet’s freedom lies precisely in the impossibility of worldly success. It is the freedom of one who knows he will never be anything but a failure in the world’s estimation, and may do as he pleases. The poet is a man on the sidelines of life, sidelined for life. He belongs to the aristocracy of the outcast, the lowest of the low, below the salt of the earth. A member of the most ancient regime in the world. One that cannot, it seems, be overthrown.

The painter puts brush to canvas, and the poet puts pen to paper. The poet has the easier task, for his pen does not alter his rhyme.

Politics in any country in the world is dangerous. For the poet, politics in any country had better be disguised as poetry. Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.

A poet or a comedian can say what's on the mind of people. They should be funny. They should make you laugh. It may be so truthful that it hurts, but it makes you laugh.

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

I think it's the responsibility of every human being, not just those who wear the identity of poet, activist, voter, religious person... it's the responsibility of every person. Our responsibility is to use our intelligence as clearly and coherently as we possibly can.

Before I went on stage at Kyle Hutton's Real Life Real Music Festival, I heard one of his songwriting students, Abbey Hirvela, sing; she was in the poet's saddle and riding that horse like she owned it. She was good! I probably ruined her by showing her how to make an E chord without the 3rd though.

Only the poet has any right to be sorry for the poor, if he has anything to spare when he has thought of the dull, commonplace rich.

I know not that there is anything in nature more soothing to the mind than the contemplation of the moon, sailing, like some planetary bark, amidst a sea of bright azure. The subject is certainly hackneyed; the moon has been sung by poet and poetaster. Is there any marvel that it should be so?

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

Bangladesh is a world of metaphor, of high and low theater, of great poetry and music. You talk to a rice farmer and you find a poet. You get to know a sweeper of the streets and you find a remarkable singer.

I do think that given my background as a poet, and also I work in a different field, you're sort of neither here nor there.

Limbs of a dismembered poet.

A French poet famously referred to the aroma of certain cheeses as the ‘pieds de Dieu’—the feet of god. Just to be clear: foot odor of a particularly exalted quality, but still—foot odor.

Memory is a poet, not an historian.

As a poet who has the tools for interpreting the poem differently, you can begin to deconstruct it. But the human being who's like, "I know about conversation, I know about language, I know about hard times," will approach the poem differently.

The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet

Ultimately you're trying to reach across and find some other person, some other human warmth. But it is, especially in written poetry, it is inscribed in a text and the text can't do that work by itself and you as a poet can only do your best.

If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself, Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth.

I celebrate myself," the poet Walt Whitman wrote. The thought is so delicious it is almost obscene. Imagine the joy that would come with celebrating the self — our achievements, our experiences, our existence. Imagine what it would be like to look into the mirror and say, as God taught us, "That's good.

Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.

Shakespeare's fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste.

An architect, to be a true exponent of his time, must possess first, last and always the sympathy, the intuition of a poet... this is the one real, vital principle that survives through all places and all times.

To a Young Poet Time cannot break the bird's wing from the bird. Bird and wing together Go down, one feather. No thing that ever flew, Not the lark, not you, Can die as others do.

Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity... Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives there was doubtless a real past, yet they had no more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo.

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.

The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.

For not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

If you're a poet and you're using rhyme, rhyme generates ideas. If you're a songwriter and you're using melody and words together, they bounce off each other in interesting ways that you couldn't get otherwise, because you do things unexpectedly.

They are fools who kiss and tell'-- Wisely has the poet sung. Man may hold all sorts of posts If he'll only hold his tongue.

Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.