The poet sees better than other mortals. I do not see things as they are, but according to my own subjective impression, and this makes life easier and simpler.
The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing.
Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.
When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.
Most poets are elitist dregs more concerned with proving their skill with a dictionary than communicating ideas with impact.
I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.
Talent is a faucet. When it is on, one must write. Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.
Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be.
The community of poets I belong to is not as close as it used to be, if only for the fact that our lives have become busier: jobs, children, and the like.
Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.
From the throes of inspiration and the eddies of thought the poet may at last be able to arrive at, and convey the right admixture of words and meaning.
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 been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.
When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.
The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate.
Jim Longenbach, poet, critic, and my husband, is always passing along life-changing books for me to read.
Good or bad, positive or negative, there is no comment more insulting to a poet than one displaying that you have not properly read and considered the things they wrote.
There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.
I am not less poet; I am more conscious of all that I am, am not, and might become.
