Poet Quotes
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I hear poetry whenever I turn on the radio. Eminem is a better poet than just about everybody. He's better than Billy Collins; he's better than Richard Wilbur; he's better than me.
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A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well.
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If I were poet now, I would not resist the temptation to trace my life back through the delicate shadows of my childhood to the precious and sheltered sources of my earliest memories. But these possessions are far too dear and sacred for the person I now am to spoil for myself. All there is to say of my childhood is that it was good and happy. I was given the freedom to discover my own inclinations and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength.
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For five hundred years after Walther's death - until Goethe - no German lyric poet was his equal.
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The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.
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If I can only be known as one thing, then, well, I guess it would be poet and performer and teacher.
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I think Lindsay Kemp really introduced me to the work of Jean Genet, and through that, I kind of kept re-educating myself about other prose writers and poets.
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The mind of a poet often performs miracles-a few coarse-grained words, apprehended become bullets and roses.
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Most poets are elitist dregs more concerned with proving their skill with a dictionary than communicating ideas with impact.
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When I mention somebody, that doesn't necessarily mean that I identify with him, personally or poetically. I'm extremely happy when I encounter poets who are different than I am. The ones who have their own distinct poetics provide me with the greatest experiences.
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Would you be a poet Before you've been to school? Ah, well! I hardly thought you So absolute a fool.
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I express myself in sculpture since I am not a poet.
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My love is a thousand French poets puking black blood on your Cure CD collection.
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The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, From earth to heaven.
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Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.
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I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of a man.
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Language can't be appropriated by one person, one poet. The words belong to all of us.
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But of the heaven which is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will sing worthily?
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a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.
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Paul Valery speaks of the 'une ligne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself.
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Happy indeed the poet of whom, like Orpheus, nothing is known but an immortal name! Happy next, perhaps, the poet of whom, like Homer, nothing is known but the immortal works. The more the merely human part of the poet remains a mystery, the more willing is the reverence given to his divine mission.
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It is the black poet who bridges the gap in tradition, who modifies tradition when experience demands it, who translates experience into meaning and meaning into belief.
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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.
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Campion is a poet who knows that what a poet sees is nothing without a mixture of formal prowess and emotional insight.
