Quotes About Poets

Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course - being also a novelist - am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?

You can't blame the President for the state of the country, it's always the poets' fault. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don't have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold.

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.

Speaking as an outsider is the most authentic voice for a poet. Poets who have one hundred thousand or one million readers [as many South Korean poets do] might not be a real, authentic poet.

Someone in Ireland asked me how many Republican poets there were in the U.S., and I thought maybe two. Maybe there are 10,000 poets, and maybe there are two Republicans among them.

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.

The ghosts of Rilke and Wordsworth--along with the 300+ MFA programs, which now seem to employ all Living Poets--have misled the American public egregiously into thinking that poets are morally pure and/or useless.

Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.

My biggest poetic influences are probably 20th-century British and Irish poets. So I suppose I'm always listening for the music I associate with that poetry, the telling images, the brevity. I want to hear it in my own work as well as in the poetry I read. However, I think I'm generally more forgiving of other poets than myself.

All men owe honor to the poets - honor and awe; for they are dearest to the Muse who puts upon their lips the ways of life.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

Always was Morocco. And recently the country's leadership seems to have embraced it in all its ill-reputed glory. The days of predatory poets in search of literary inspiration and young flesh are probably over for good. Hippies can just as easily get their bong riffs in Portland or Peoria. But the good stuff, the real good stuff, the sounds and smells and the look of Tangier -- what you see and hear when you lean out the window and take it all in -- that's here to stay.

The Irish believed that gods, druids, poets, and others in touch with the magical world could be literal shape-shifters

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.

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.

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

I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

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.

Despite wanting to work in publishing, I was a publisher's worst nightmare: I rarely bought new books. So my goal was to publish the kind of books I would buy, and read. My reading habits have changed since starting the press. The only other "goal", per say, is to continue to experiment. I don't want the press to ever fall into a formula, or to be pigeonholed - "They do great reissues of modernist poets!" - I want to keep pushing, exploring the kind of title we can get away with. And working with authors who challenge the way I think about writing, editing and reading.

We are chained hand and foot by protocol, enslaved to a static, empty world where men and women can’t read, where the scientific advances of the ages are the preserve of the rich, where artists and poets are doomed to endless repetitions and sterile reworking of past masterpieces. Nothing is new. New does not exist. Nothing changes, nothing grows, evolves, develops. Time has stopped. Progress is forbidden

The poets and philosophers I once loved had it wrong. Death does not come to us all, nor does the passage of time dim our memories and reduce our bodies to dust. Because while I was considered dead, and a headstone had been engraved with my name, in truth my life was just beginning.

I know that in some ways I operate from a kind of antiquated interest in imagery, while many contemporary poets are not so interested in imagery. I think part of it is my training, and just my visual sense of things.

We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one. There is, indeed, a certain low and moderate sort of poetry, that a man may well enough judge by certain rules of art; but the true, supreme, and divine poesy is equally above all rules and reason. And whoever discerns the beauty of it with the most assured and most steady sight sees no more than the quick reflection of a flash of lightning.

The New York School poets are my godfathers creatively.

When I first collected these authorities, I was desirous that every quotation should be useful to some other end than the illustration of a word; I therefore extracted from philosophers principles of science; from historians remarkable facts; from chymists complete processes; from divines striking exhortations; and from poets beautiful descriptions.

I have never studied the art of paying compliments to women; but I must say that if all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice for their conduct during this war.

I just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written a poem that is a kind of parody of a garrulous poet at a poetry reading who spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the poem before reading it, I've written a number of satirical poems about other poets.

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.

I hope I can write toward my interests. But poets should be afraid of too fluidly responding to what they're interested in.

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

Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music.

A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe.

Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.

Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

I'm from Chicago, so the Chicago working-class poets still mean a great deal to me.

Maybe the poets are right. Maybe love is the only answer.

The maiden Olympics had more to protest about than mere war, though. Central to its ethos was a rejection of two establishments the political one, certainly, but also that of the wider poetry world itself. It changed poetry for ever in the UK, ... It led to readings all over the country. You suddenly got more women reading and publishing poems, as well as gay guys and poets from all over the world. Until that time, published poetry had been very university-based white, male, middle-class. We were trying to break poetry out of its academic confines.

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.

There is a line from the Marina Tsvetaeva poem I'm so fond of: "In this most Christian of worlds/ All poets are Jews." What she means is that writers and artists are outside the normal flow of daily life, the normal flow of society in general.

Poets are the sense, philosophers­­ the intelligence­­ of humanity.

Adrienne Rich was one of the most widely-read and influential poets of her time, a leading feminist, known especially for her politically-engaged verse. Her best-known volume, "Diving into the Wreck," won the National Book Award in 1973.

When I say be creative I don't mean that you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem.

When some portion of the biosphere is rather unpopular with the human race-a crocodile, a dandelion, a stony valley, a snowstorm, an odd-shaped flint-there are three sorts of human being who are particularly likely still to see point in it and befriend it. They are poets, scientists and children. Inside each of us, I suggest, representatives of all these groups can be found.

Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.

Before men ever wrote in clay they cast their words in verse and line, rythymbound in poets' minds, defying time and age.

One reads thousands of books, of poets, modern and ancient, as one meets thousands of people. What remains of it all is hard to tell.

Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill.