Quotes About Poets

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

There's not a big range in the political poetry of the last year, or not a political range. On the one hand, no poet that I know of who writes in English in the United States is anything but a humanist. So all poets, including myself, seem to be under that umbrella. We just don't have Rush Limbaugh poets, Ann Coulter poets.

After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.

I tend to like the way poets form communities. Writing can be lonely after all. Modern life can be lonely. Poets do seem to be more social than fiction writers. This could be because of poetry's roots in the oral tradition - poetry is read aloud and even performed. I'm just speculating, of course. At any rate, because poets form these groups, they learn from one another. That is one of the best things about being a poet.

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.

But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.

I've always been more than a little mystified by poets who seem to think talking to people as directly as possible is a bad thing. I mean, I don't want to set up a straw man here: I understand that for many poets - and for me, at times - writing truly means writing in a way that is difficult, simply because the poem is trying to grasp for something elusive. So the difficulty of the poem is just unavoidable, and not in any way artificially imposed. So "as possible" is the key part of the phrase above, I suppose.

Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find political reasons for the commercial schemes that they have done for some time past they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers... I do resent the whole age of patronage being revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets becoming court poets, under kings that have taken no oath.

I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.

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.

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.

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... How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!

You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.

If any of you are secret poets, the best way to break into print is to run for the presidency.

Andy Brown is one of our most interesting and exciting younger poets. With its love of ideas and language, his work demonstrates that there need be no barriers in poetry; that the philosophical, the lyrical and the playful can be combined in work of assured and generous vision.

And they were all, when their souls grew warm, poets.

The violinist must possess the poets gift of piercing the protective hide which grows on propagandists, stockbrokers and slave traders, to penetrate the deeper truth which lies within.

Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.

We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.

We are pantheists as natural scientists, polytheists as poets, and monotheists as moral beings.

The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.

Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

Patricia Smith is one of the best poets around and has been for a long time. Her Blood Dazzler is full of capacious soul and formal inventiveness: the compassion and artfulness necessary to capture the tragedies and Tragedy of Katrina. Smith is herself a storm of beautiful, frightening talent. Her words will wash you or wash you away. I consider this new book a major literary event.

When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed anddrawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men,--those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

I love those moments on stage, on screen and in life when you dispense with language, when you sort of transcend it in a way, and certainly the experience of falling in love, I think, defies words, which is why poets, painters, musicians, actors have tried to describe that feeling, writers have just tried to put words to that.

I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

I once gave a workshop and I asked the women poets there, If you went back to that little town you've come from - these were from small towns - would you say, I'm a poet? And one of them said, If I said I was a poet in that town, they'd think I didn't wash my windows. And that stayed with me for so long, the sense of the collective responsibility of someone as against the individual thing it takes to be a poet.

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

To a Mistress Dying Lover. YOUR beauty, ripe and calm and fresh As eastern summers are, Must now, forsaking time and flesh, Add light to some small star. Philosopher. Whilst she yet lives, were stars decay'd, Their light by hers relief might find; But Death will lead her to a shade Where Love is cold and Beauty blind. Lover. Lovers, whose priests all poets are, Think every mistress, when she dies, Is changed at least into a star: And who dares doubt the poet wise? Philosopher. But ask not bodies doom'd to die To what abode they go; Since Knowledge is but Sorrow's spy, It is not safe to know.

Poetry is not a silent art. The poem must perform, unaided, in its reader's head. Educated readers give themselves a good performance. Educated listeners compare performance with text and with other performances. Good poets use the full resources of language.

What I'm nostalgic for is the idea of an edge in New York. There used to be these fringes of the city where civilization sort of ended, and therefore young people could live cheaply, or open nightclubs or art galleries, or even squat. That fringe moved out to New Jersey and Brooklyn. The whole idea of the metropolis is the centralization of like-minded souls, and when the central real estate becomes too expensive, the dreamers, the young poets, and the artists will go elsewhere.

Theodore Dalrymple is a brilliant observer of both medicine and society, and his book wittily engages with two versions of the current nonsense: orthodox medicine on drug addiction, and romantic poets on the wisdom you supposedly enjoy from getting high.

Mediocrity is not allowed to poets, either by the gods or men.

The underground went really underground. Grand Funk, and all these people man are the moderate's choice of music. Underground is Yoko Ono, The Black Poets. These people scare the hell out of most freaks. They laugh at Yoko Ono, but it's the whole cliché.

Wine has been with us since the beginning of civilization. It is the temperate, civilized, sacred, romantic mealtime beverage recommended in the Bible. Wine has been praised for centuries by statesmen, philosophers, poets, and scholars. Wine in moderation is an integral part of our culture, heritage and gracious way of life.

I look at the great poets of the Soviet Union, like Anna Akhmatova, who endured far worse then anything we've seen or hopefully that we will ever see. If they could keep writing and keep a voice alive, keep people hopeful through their poetry, then I would be ashamed to stop and to give in. It would be really self-indulgent, unacceptable, and inexcusable to walk away from it.

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

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

There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about "finding your own voice as a poet", which I suppose means that you come out from under the direct influence of other poets and have perhaps found a way to combine those influences so that it appears to be your own voice.

Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.

Where are the leaders?' Sapphique asked. 'In the fortresses,' the swan replied. 'And the poets?' 'Lost in dreams of other worlds.' 'And the craftsmen?' 'Forging machines to challenge the darkness.' 'And the Wise, who made the world?' The swan lowered its black neck sadly. 'Dwindled to crones and sorcerers in towers.

What I might do is watch Mrs Doubtfire. Or Dead Poets Society or Good Will Hunting and I might be nice to people, mindful today how fragile we all are, how delicate we are, even when fizzing with divine madness that seems like it will never expire.

Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend.