Quotes About Poet

If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.

Part of the pleasure of giving a reading comes from the rapport between the audience and the poet. I don't want to get mystical here, but there's an energy flow that begins with the poet, and the energy goes out to the audience, and they're energized, and then they return that energy to the poet. As someone standing up there alone, facing these people, I can feel that rapport (or its absence).

Another trouble with poetry - and I'm gonna stop the list at two - is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry, the sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted an interest on the reader's part in the poet's autobiographical life, in the poet's memories, problems, difficulties and even minor perceptions.

I know that in a poem, even when the speaker is speaking from the poet's experience, there's always something that's borrowed, some authority that sits outside of the poet that the poem has claimed. There's a dramatic pitch that makes the speaker capable of saying something more courageous or stranger or simply other than what the poet would be able to say.

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.

In England especially, poetry's woven into the background fabric of society. And in Ireland, it's in the foreground. The place of the poet in Irish society is enormous. If you say you're a poet in Ireland, you'd better know what you're doing, because the standard and the expectations are incredibly high.

For as fire is kindled by fire, so is a poet's mind kindled by contact with a brother poet.

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.

Jacob wrote that the true poet 'is like a man who is happy anywhere, in endless measure, if he is allowed to look at leaves and grass, to see the sun rise and set. The false poet travels abroad in strange countries and hopes to be uplifted by the mountains of Switzerland, the sky and sea of Italy. He comes to them and is dissatisfied. He is not as happy as the man who stays at home and sees the apple trees flower in spring, and hears the small birds singing among the branches

The workplace needs the poet's gift. But the poet also needs to be educated about the workplace. You're not just coming in to do your art, you're actually making yourself vulnerable. You yourself are not God's gift to truth. You have to hazard yourself in their world, especially because you're inviting people to do the same. It's all about become visible, becoming incarnate, becoming here and now and yet with our eyes on a future horizon; holding the conversation you were meant to hold.

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

We could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words.

Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet.

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

Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.

Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.

Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

Mandelstam is the sort of poet who comes along very, very rarely. Even the two Russian poets whose work is often linked with his - Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva - though their work is more "urgent" than most American poetry, seem to me to operate at a lesser charge than Mandelstam.

If I were poet now, I would not resist the temptation to trace my life back through the delicate shadows of my childhood to the precious and sheltered sources of my earliest memories. But these possessions are far too dear and sacred for the person I now am to spoil for myself. All there is to say of my childhood is that it was good and happy. I was given the freedom to discover my own inclinations and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength.

Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.

The poet dreams of the classroom I dreamed I stood up in class And I said aloud: Teacher, Why is algebra important? Sit down, he said. Then I dreamed I stood up And I said: Teacher, I’m weary of the turkeys That we have to draw every fall. May I draw a fox instead? Sit down, he said. Then I dreamed I stood up once more and said: Teacher, My heart is falling asleep And it wants to wake up. It needs to be outside. Sit down, he said.

Robert Frost really started this whole thing rolling. He was, I believe, the first poet who started going to colleges. Before that, poets didn't give public readings very often, certainly not - there was no circuit of schools.

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

Valentine's Day is the poet's holiday.

You can never hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture as the poet put it, but it stays with you like a good acid trip.

He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.

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.

It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.

I try to, at least once or twice a week, have someone over and model, usually a dancer friend or a poet or someone to come over and just stay still for me. Depending on how exhibitionist they are, it will determine the finished work. And I say, "You're the muse; you come up with it. I'll draw you however you want."

Spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.

I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.

for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?

The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality.

I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes...

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

The poet is an untier of knots, and love without words is a knot, and it drowns.

a poet is someone who is abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement. Which is to say the highest form of concentration possible: fascination; to report on the electrifying experience of being

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth…but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

Technology will never rescue anyone from being a bad poet, but if you're good, it has the potential to do a lot of exciting things.

Some people are suspicious of others who have more than one talent. I've had poets tell me to my face that an actress can't be a poet.

Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness...and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.

Our taste is too delicate and particular. It says nay to the poet's work, but never yea to his hope.

Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?

Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same. Gossip is the tool of the poet, the shop-talk of the scientist, and the consolation of the housewife, wit, tycoon and intellectual. It begins in the nursery and ends when speech is past.

The poet's business is not to save the soul of man but to make it worth saving.