Poet Quotes
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Inspiration is inbreathing, indwelling, poetry can never be entirely willed. It may be true a poet is given only a single line but that line is a gift from the unconscious, intution, a perception.
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I am a great admirer of Robert Vavra and love his beautiful photographs and books. He is a wonderful artist, a poet...
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I'm not a poet. I'm not up onstage to get something off my chest. I'm making musical statements, or, most of the time, musical questions for people to figure out, and I'm not going to get in the way of that.
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Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.
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We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.
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Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry
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Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as soon as he reflects he is a child.
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When the poet died his cat was put to death and mummified.
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A great poet ought to a certain degree to rectify men's feelings... to render their feelings more sane, pure and permanent, in short, more consonant to Nature.
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It is heresy to say that we shall ever again produce a poet of Shakespeare's stature, but we have faith that when the spirit of man comes really to need another, he will be there.
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Lovers, Lunatics and poets are made of same stuff.
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The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.
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The poet, like the lover, is a person unable to reconcile what he knows with what he feels. His peculiarity is that he is under a certain compulsion to do so.
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Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
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There were a hundred booksellers in the old round city founded by the eighth-century caliph al-Mansur. The café and wine-drinking culture of Baghdad has been famous for centuries; there was a whole school of Iraqi poets who wrote poems about the wine bars of medieval Baghdad - the khamriyaat, or wine songs, that I quote in the book.
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But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.
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A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.
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As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.
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poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of the world we carry within us.
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while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
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What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.
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Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house
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The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
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I'm afraid I take ... this rather clinical view of love: it's saving you from madness. I'm not so enthusiastic as other poets have been.
