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.

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.

The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.

One can say that the disaffection is still a lingering naiveté about, not the place of poetry in the world, but - how to say this - the moral and intellectual presence of poets in the world. And while this may seem an old conversation to many poets who roll their eyes and say, "Here we go again about the function of poetry," I think that conversation, about poetry as an engaged art in a world that is full of regression or still lacking in progress, is still really not well-developed. It's almost an avoided conversation.

The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.

My life all-around is really different than a lot of other poets. Not poets that are parents, too, but just that I can hardly find anyone who works in the industries that I've worked in.

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.

I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.

I see that you believe in love such as the poets and romancers have represented... The poets represent love as the sculptors design beauty, as the musicians create melody; that is to say, endowed with an exquisite nervous organization, they gather up with discerning ardor the purest elements of life, the most beautiful lines of matter, and the most harmonious voices of nature.... To try to find in real life such love as this, eternal and absolute, is the same thing as to seek on the public squares such a woman as Venus or to expect nightingales to sing the symphonies of Beethoven.

It's difficult to put your own bare ass out on the limb every time you sit down to write a poem. But that's really sort of the ideal. Because if we don't discover something about ourselves and our world in the making of a poem, chances are it's not going to be a very good poem. So what I'm saying is that a lot of our best poets could be better poets if they wrote less and risked more in what they do.

Metaphor impinges on everything, allowing us - poets and non-poets alike - to experience and think about the world in fluid, unusual ways.

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.

I had been dreaming a complicated dream about helping poets revise their poems, so that each ending would open like a flower. I was not arguing, but engaged in a rousing discussion.

Everyone is a poet at 16, but how many are poets at 50? Generally, people seem to get more conservative as they age, but in my case, I seem to have gotten more radical.

My message is not wholly understood; only poets understand it.

This great Mughal Emperor [Akbar] was illiterate; he could neither read nor write. However, that had not stopped Akbar from cultivating the acquaintance of the most learned and cultured poets, authors, musicians, and architects of the time - relying solely on his remarkable memory during conversations with them.

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.

Ah, there are so many things betwixt heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed!

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

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

There's the brilliant audacity of youth that poets strike upon in their earliest work sometimes that they never can hit upon again.

It is possible that Mount Olympus may have supplied the poets with the hint for saying that Jupiter obtained the kingdom of heaven, because Olympus is the common name both of the mountain and of heaven.

Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult poets that I really enjoy reading.

Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion, love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as it should be. But no man is perpetually in a passion and those states in which he is amused and amusing, detached and irreverent, if less important, are no less amusing. If there were no poets who, like Byron, express these states, Poetry would lack something.

One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.

Chameleons feed on light and air: Poets food is love and fame.

With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have all but outsung the bell. The inarticulate bell has found too much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature.

Lazy poets try to elicit a reader's response with words designed to tug at the heart.

One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.

At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.

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.

And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.

Every wild apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every wild child. It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise. What a lesson to man! So are human beings, referred to the highest standard, the celestial fruit which they suggest and aspire to bear, browsed on by fate; and only the most persistent and strongest genius defends itself and prevails, sends a tender scion upward at last, and drops its perfect fruit on the ungrateful earth. Poets and philosophers and statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the hosts of unoriginal men.

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?

All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual.

Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.

The way our big cities change sucks. The beauty of cities was that they were edgy, sometimes even a little dangerous. Artists, poets, and activists could come and unify and create different kinds of scenes. Not just fashion scenes, scenes that were politically active. Big cities are getting so high-end oriented, business corporate fashion, fashion not in an artistic sense but in a corporate sense. For me that edgy beauty of cities is lost, wherever you go.

We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imagining of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck-half of us upside down-by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.

Sunlight 's a thing that needs a window Before it enter a dark room. Windows don't happen." So two old poets, Hunched at their beer in the low haze Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran Noisily by them, glib with prose.

... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence.

I fell in love. It felt exactly like a fall, a head-over-heels tumble into a state of unbearable lightness. The earth tilted on its axis. I did not believe in romantic love at the time, thinking it a human construct, an invention of fourteenth century Italian poets. I was as unprepared for love as I had been for goodness and beauty. Suddenly, my heart seemed swollen, too large for my chest.

Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality.

It's interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls.

As poets, our lamentations are glorious, filled with the virtues angles would learn to envy.

Children have a master to teach them, grown-ups have the poets.

They say poets write mostly for themselves; if anyone else likes it, well and good, if not, it doesn't matter; certainly, not to me.