Poet Quotes

The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.

I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.

I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.

Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time.

The poet laureate of England talked about murdering Jews on the West Bank.

We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

I'm tired of being this solemn poet of the masses, the enigma shrouded in a mystery.

The poet's spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth.

A paranoiac like a poet, is born, not made.