Quotes About Poets

One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets.

The category "Women Poets" is bizarre and irrelevant. It's a subcategory of Poets, but there is not a "Men Poets" category.

The poets are supposed to liberate the words – not chain them in phrases. Who told the poets they were supposed to think? Poets are meant to sing and to make words sing. Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? 'Your very own words,' indeed! And who are you?

The problem with describing poets as legislators is that at that level of politics - politics as political invention - poets have no special skills and are not apt to.

We all dream profusely every night, yet by morning we've forgotten ninety percent of what went on. That's why poets are such important members of society. Poets remember our dreams for us.

I was on television a couple of years ago and the reporter asked me, "How does it feel being on mainstream media? It's not often poets get on mainstream media." I said, "Well I think you're the dominant media, the dominant culture, but you're not the mainstream media. The mainstream media is still the high culture of intellectuals: writers, readers, editors, librarians, professors, artists, art critics, poets, novelists, and people who think. They are the mainstream culture, even though you may be the dominant culture."

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

I think poets tell better history than historians. Historians lie all the time but the poets can get to truth of it.

Some of the old folk singers used to phrase things in an interesting way, and then, I got my style from seeing a lot of outdoor-type poets, who would recite their poetry. When you don't have a guitar, you recite things differently, and there used to be quite a few poets in the jazz clubs, who would recite with a different type of attitude.

It will be hard James but you come from sturdy peasant stock men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity You come from a long line of great poets some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said "The very time I thought I was lost My dungeon shook and my chains fell off." You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you James and Godspeed.

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.

I love to publish new writers, and we do so consistently. But a lot of contemporary American poets sound alike to me. They want to bring spoken, prosy language into poetry and I understand that desire. But they don't edit. It's not very curated work. It seems very lackluster, very uncareful. It may be the un-carefulness is also something they intend but there's a kind of "So what?" quality to a lot of it.

One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.

You searched through all my poets, From Sappho through to Auden, I saw the book fall from your hands, As you slowly died of boredom.

Italian is a very different poetic situation and there are these hard and fast rhythmic periods, settenari, ottonari of seven and eight syllables. These are fundamental to the way people speak and write and breaking them is more radical in Italian than when we break a line. I'm sure there are Italian poets who want to write poetry as prose and break these Petrarchan rules. And breaking them is fun and a valid thing to do. But I'm more interested in trying to write poetry that absorbs tradition and uses it in new ways, and doesn't throw it out.

There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.

Of necessity, we made the discovery that it is easier to turn poets into business journalists than to turn bookkeepers into writers.

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.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

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

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

Who, except the poets, reads poetry?

If I were a teacher, I would like to teach freshman English - so I could be the Robin Williams type in Dead Poets Society. I wanna be that guy. I couldn't teach seniors because they'd be smarter than me.

Poets are born, not paid.

Man demands truth and fulfills this demand in moral intercourse with other men; this is the basis of all social life. One anticipates the unpleasant consequences of reciprocal lying. From this there arises the duty of truth. We permit epic poets to lie because we expect no detrimental consequences in this case. Thus the lie is permitted where it is considered something pleasant. Assuming that it does no harm, the lie is beautiful and charming.

Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult...The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning.

Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.

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

Them lady poets must not marry, pal.

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.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony.

Of what violences, murders, depredations, have not the epic poets, from all antiquity, been the occasion, by propagating false honor, false glory, and false religion?

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.

Sometimes the greatest love is not found in the dramatic scenes that poets and writers immortalize. Often, the greatest manifestations of love are the simple acts of kindness and caring we extend to those we meet along the path of life.

The greatest poets are those with memories so great that they extend beyond their strongest experiences to their minutest observations of people and things far outside their own self-centeredness.

Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

Anyone who wants to be a writer should, if given the opportunity, hang out with "real writers," that is, poets or writers who are lions in literature, semi-lions, or published authors.

Rash combat oft immortalizes man; if he should fall, he is renowned in song; but after-ages reckon not the ceaseless tears which the forsaken woman sheds. Poets tell us not of the many nights consumed in weeping, or of the dreary days wherein her anguished soul vainly yearns to call her loved one back.

I've learned that my readings of others' work often has little connection to their intentions. This doesn't mean that my response is wrong, and it doesn't make the author's views less right. Poets, like their poems, are "hopeful monsters".

An emperor knows how to govern when poets are free to make verses, people to act plays, historians to tell the truth, ministers to give advice, the poor to grumble at taxes, students to learn lessons aloud, workmen to praise their skill and seek work, people to speak of anything, and old men to find fault with everything.

It is the gift of all poets to find the commonplace astonishing, and the astonishing quite natural.

There's always been what I would call the William Carlos Williams strain, in which poems of simplicity and clarity are valued by a different community. I was talking to Galway Kinnell one day, and he said that there was an audience for poetry up until about 1920 and then, from that point on, the poets and the critics drifted.

I think that the dark side of MFA programs is that they're generating more poets than the culture can absorb and there are more people writing poetry than possibly read it or can certainly earn a living around it.

Poets can tell the truth as they see it. It’s the author’s story, the author’s voice.

The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.