Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree.
Did you know that Bharatiyar used the pen name “Shelley-dasan”? He admired the poems of Shelley so deeply that he wrote under the name “Shelley’s servant”. Wasn’t that a wonderful gesture of humility by someone who was such a great poet h...
I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant.
The Chinese poet George Wu ... recorded on his comlog: "Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become." Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: "Words are the only bu...
I do not think, I note (Je ne pense pas; je note)
A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
A poem needs as well as of content.
Everyone should follow his predetermined path.
The first and the last steps on the ladder of life are the most insightful.
And remember this most of all: when it is darkest, that is when you can see the stars most clearly.
Love is love. It is God-given, and a sacrament. It is not for any man to judge.
I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.
Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas.
There are two types of poets: People who write poetically about their lives, and poets that live poetically and write about it.
Meeks: I'll try anything once. Dalton: Except sex.
Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.
Young poets bewail the passing of love; old poets, the passing of time. There is surprisingly little difference.
Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and s...
A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody...
Songs of myself I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into new tongue. I am the poet of the w...
