This constant basso on the horizon is it the waterfall or the cannon ("Poem")
Praise from your heart caresses my soul.
Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.
Will our lives be dull or packed with adventure?
I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.
As fire kindled by fire, so is the poet's mind kindled by contact with a brother poet.
John Keating: We're not laughing at you - we're laughing near you.
Neil: If I don't ask him, at least I won't be disobeying him.
For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.
The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.
Recall what used to be the theme of poetry in the romantic era. In neat verses the poet lets us share his private, bourgeois emotions: his sufferings great and small, his nostalgias, his religious or political pre-occupations, and, if he were English...
Being the first black Nobel laureate, and the first African, the African world considered me personal property. I lost the remaining shreds of my anonymity, even to walk a few yards in London, Paris or Frankfurt without being stopped.
Poets, like fighters, both reap the benefits of roadwork.
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
Only the power of light illuminates our thoughts and our being.
Love is the true wealth, which can do entirely without wealth.
Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.
The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.
Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.
