I'd like people to remember me for a diligent expert workman. I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God's a workman. I don't think there's anything better than a workman.
Whilst in Prussia poets only speak of the love of country as one of the dearest of all human affections, here there is no man who does not feel, and describe with rapture, how much he loves his country.
I'm very proud of the fact that I'm one of Britain's biggest selling poets. That gives me a huge amount of pleasure.
I hear poets complaining: 'We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that.'
I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.
Why should the composer be more guilty than the poet who warms to fantasy by a strange flame, making an idea that inspires him the subject of his own very different treatment?
If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven.
At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism.
Poets have to be sensitive to their audience, but it does not mean that they censor themselves. I realise my audience is diverse. Some will read with empathy and curiosity while others will take offense.
The poets carry feelings, delivering desires and dispatching dreams. Even if sometimes they need pack some sorrows, distill several disappointments and filter strange nightmares.
Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
I am no Poet here; my pen's the spout where the rain water of my eyes run out.
I have witness the stars brighter than a poet can create a simpleton world. Shall we write 'until death do us part.
Such was a poet and shall be and is -who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand.
The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.
What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
Aspirations don’t make poets, perseverance does. Flow with the emotions, let your imagination soar, find what ignites the fire within and let it go wild.
At this moment, by an undeserved stroke of fortune, I am the direct voice of the poets of my race and the indirect voice for the noble Spanish and Portuguese tongues.
San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.
A nation's poets are its true owners; and by the stroke of the pen they convey the title-deeds of its real possessions to strangers and aliens.
I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
