I don't need fame and I don't need power and I don't need wealth. I'm in need of friends, which I have found in abundance.
The only time I've been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.
Ambition has but one reward for all: A little power, a little transient fame; A grave to rest in, and a fading name!
The wise become as the unwise in the enchanted chambers of Power, whose lamps make every face the same colour.
The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.
Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.
France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her.
I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.
Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.
Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.
I guess the thing that I'm most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It's the source of my creativity.
No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.
I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.
What's the function of poetry? It's to express general truths, to connect with the reader and make him think: 'Wow, I've experienced that, but you've expressed it so much better.'
Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.
Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.
I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.
That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.
I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.
