Poet Quotes

I am no Poet here; my pen's the spout where the rain water of my eyes run out.

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination.

I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.

I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

But the lover's power is the poet's power. He can make love from all the common strings with which this world is strung.

Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.

It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back.

A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.

The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.

Are you really going to see Lewis? One of the few people it's worth getting excited over, I think. I know he is a good poet. I daresay he never heard of me, but I wish you would tell him that his work is the joy of my life.

A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.

For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.

In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.

I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the world's greatest dramatic poet, but regret that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the hands of his daughter, and therefore I have prepared the Family Shakespeare.

I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's.

The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.

I've always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, "Truth is the daughter of Time."

Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

We met with the poet Frank O'Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings.

Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.