Quotes About Poet

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).

A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.

Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet's life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) the poet loses his or her balance for a moment, slips into being what he or she is, uses his or her poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead person.

So, I've never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don't want to be read as just a black poet, or just a woman poet, or just someone who represents a cause, an anti-Vietnam war poet.

Creativity has three layers; the ultimate is the mystic: he lives in a climate of creativity. The poet, once in a while, brings some treasures from the beyond; the scientist, also very rarely, but whenever he can visit the ultimate he brings something precious to the world. But one thing is certain - mystic, scientist or poet, whatsoever comes into this world comes from the beyond. To bring the beyond is creativity. To bring the beyond into the known is creativity. To help God to be manifested in some form is creativity.

I think the poet is the last person who is still speaking the truth when no one else dares to. I think the poet is the first person to begin the shaping and visioning of the new forms and the new consciousness when no one else has begun to sense it; I think these are two of the most essential human functions.

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.

Gabriel Levin's book is a journey through time and through entrenched animosities of the Middle East. What's astonishing and refreshing is his ability to combine the reporter's perspective with a deep knowledge of poetry, including pre-Islamic Arab poems. A brilliant poet is at work here-a poet in the rugged landscape of conflict and pain.

The fact that I'm a woman is as important to my work as a poet as the fact that Ahmad Shāmlu was a man was important to his work as a poet. Basically, gender shouldn't be viewed as an advantage in art. If a poem or a piece of writing is good, what difference does it make whether it's by a woman or a man? And, if it's bad, why should its writer's gender make it good?

The spiritual kinship between Lincoln and Whitman was founded upon their Americanism, their essential Westernism. Whitman had grown up without much formal education; Lincoln had scarcely any education. One had become the notable poet of the day; one the orator of the Gettsyburg Address. It was inevitable that Whitman as a poet should turn with a feeling of kinship to Lincoln, and even without any association or contact feel that Lincoln was his.

I began writing for kids because I wanted to effect a change in American society. I continue in that spirit. By the time we reach adulthood, we are closed and set in our attitudes. The chances of a poet reaching us are very slim. But I can open a child's imagination, develop his appetite for poetry, and more importantly, show him that poetry is a natural part of everyday life. We all need someone to point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. That's the poet's job.

He who writes poetry is not a poet. He whose poetry has become his life, and who has made his life his poetry - it is he who is a poet.

This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost everybody is a poet, but scarcely anyone can write a poem.

We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it.

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.

Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet.

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.

I'm now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a seer. You won't understand any of this, and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It's really not my fault.

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke

Even if you're a poet sitting in your room writing a poem, you're still in the world - although I guess being a poet is a different than having to deal with 40 or 50 people to raise a couple million bucks and all that bullshit.

Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.

Did the gods once mingle with humankind, or is Homer a visionary madman, or, what is worse, a mere poet, a maker-up of beautiful falsities, an elegant liar? I shall grapple with that perplexity, only to emerge as I went in, in a cloud of unknowing, if perhaps a little the wiser.

A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.

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.

And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.

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

I wish that we lived in a time and a generation where people would stop viewing my honesty as overly emotional. People always act like I spend my life crying in a dark room. I don't, I'm good. I'm a man. I want to be remembered as an artist that gave you a piece of me, as opposed to some surface bullshit. I don't think people realize that we die, we leave here, and either they forget about you or remember you. And how they remember you is up to you. I just want to be remembered as a poet that was open and honest because I wake up every morning and I'm me.

The poet, the artist, the sleuth, whoever sharpens our perception tends to antisocial; rarely 'well adjusted,' he cannot go along with currents and trends.

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.

The more the poet grows, the deeper the level of creative intuition descends into the density of his soul. Where formerly he could be moved to song, he can do nothing now, he must dig deeper.

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.

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

The poet is the man made to solve the riddle of the universe who brings the whole soul of man into activity.

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.

Embellish the soul with simplicity, with prudence, and everything which is neither virtuous nor vicious. Love all men. Walk according to God; for, as a poet hath said, his laws govern all.

The most original sin is not the thinker's but the poet's.

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.

Careful there, Poet. I might start to believe you.

The female doesn't want a rich man or a handsome man or even a poet, she wants a man who understands her eyes if she gets sad, and points to his chest and say : 'Here is your home country.'

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

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.

A fine lady; by which term I wish to express the result of that perfect education in taste and manner, down to every gesture, which heaven forbid that I, professing to be a poet, should undervalue. It is beautiful, and therefore I welcome it in the name of the author of all beauty. I value it so highly that I would fain see it extend not merely from Belgravia to the tradesman's villa, but thence, as I believe it one day will, to the laborer's hovel and the needlewoman's garret.

For the poet is a light winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer with him. When he has not attained this state he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles.

Every other species of talent carries with it its eternity; we enjoy the work of the poet, the painter, the sculptor, only as thousands will do after us; but the actor - his memory is with his generation, and that passes away.

If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him.

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.

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

The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing?