Poet Quotes
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A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.
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Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.
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The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.
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The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.
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He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.
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Those things which make the infernal regions terrible, the darkness, the prison, the river of flaming fire, the judgment seat, are all a fable, with which the poets amuse themselves, and by them agitate us with vain terrors.
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A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner; nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people.
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Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.
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I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet.
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Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.
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My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.
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What are we singers but the silver-voiced messengers of the poet and the musician?
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In the streets the children screamed. The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed
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If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.
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The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses.
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For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him.
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A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.
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A scientist with a poet's command of language, Cristina Eisenberg writes with precision and passion . . . takes her reader on a breathtaking, sometimes heartbreaking tour of the planet from the Gulf of Maine to the Amazonian rain forests, the tropical coral reefs to old growth forests of the Northwest as well as rivers, lakes, and wetlands. I found the wealth of information not only accessible but riveting . . . Eisenberg's powerful, beautifully written book . . . has the potential to open many people's eyes, minds, and hearts.
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The poet Amanda Nadelberg puts it nicely in an interview when she says "often what I listen for in poems is a sense that the writer is a little lost, not deliberately withholding information or turning on the heavy mystery machines, but honestly confounded - by the world? isn't it so? - and letting others listen in on that figuring." That's what engages me - the mind in motion, the drama of someone in the process of thinking - and it's the elusive mystery of those movements that I hope to capture in my essays.
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I'm obviously not orthodox, I don't know how many real poets have ever been orthodox.
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The spirit of the poet craves spectators... even if only buffaloes.
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There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.
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Men and women who are lonely create. Those who are gregarious rarely do... Any poet would rather bed with a girl than write a poem about her. All art is the result of frustration. Art is energy deflected from its normal course in action.
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As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail.
