I'm probably much more influenced by film-makers and painters than I am by other songwriters or poets.
Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.
Blake said Milton was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it. I am of the Devil's party and know it.
It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.
To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.
I'm inspired by the poets, so I'm always going to give in that direction, rather than in any other. It's the making of me... and also the downfall of me.
If the poets offered us nothing more than another make-believe world, they would be mere sellers of drugs or, at best, sweetmeats.
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.
It seems to me that the poet has only to perceive that which others do not perceive, to look deeper than others look. And the mathematician must do the same thing.
From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue.
Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.
Katherine Sedley was the only daughter and heiress to the libertine poet Sir Charles Sedley, and grew into a thoroughly scandalous lady in her own right.
The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.
You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.
Is the biographer an artist who can and should exist on equal terms with the dramatist, fiction writer and poet? The short and robust answer is, 'Certainly not.'
Meet everyone with utmost respect and heartfelt love. Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann, POET 2013 – Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Secretly, deep down, everybody on Earth believes they can write poetry, apart from the members of the Poets' Guild, who know they can't.
Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish.
The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.
Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.
There is an extraordinary degree of amity among Washington poets. They hang together. You would be hard pressed to find that in Manhattan.
