Although Poets are vain and ambitious, their vanity and ambition are of the purest kind attainable in this world. They are ambitious to be accepted for what they altimately are as revealed in their poetry.
I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
Of course, I have to consider that I've written a lot of prose, but I do in my heart think of myself as being originally, and still primarily, a poet.
I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?
Only a few have learned to savor the significance of solitude. Those who can glory in being alone on occasion are the saint or poet or explorer.
Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.
Tennyson seems to be the patron saint of the wishy washies, which is perhaps why I admire him so much, not only as a poet, but as a man.
But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them.
It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.
Before you judge me as some kind of 'anything goes' language heathen, let me just say that I'm not against usage standards. I don't violate them when I want to sound like an educated person, for the same reason I don't wear a bikini to a funeral when...
The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is chea...
I watched bulls bred to cows, watched mares foal, I saw life come from the egg and the multiplicative wonders of mudholes and ponds, the jell and slime of life shimmering in gravid expectation. Everywhere I looked, life sprang from something not life...
I am the poet, you are the poem; I hold the pen, you are the words, love is the ink, silence is the blank page.
Whatever is language is poetic language and if the word required by the poet does not exist in his known language then it is up to him to discover it.
We give up our backs and allow religious myths to apply the rear naked choke to our minds.
The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.
She was so intelligent that she could think herself into beauty. Intelligence...they don't talk about it much, the poets, but when a woman is intelligent and passionate and good...
Periods' are largely an invention of the historians. The poets themselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.
Among the world's evils—fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation— smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kid's school.
... paint in blue and black...sometimes gray - the colors of night - occasionally I surprise you with a mustard yellow, but then, I am a poet ...
This was what the poets couldn't put in their poetry, she thought dumbly, the rush of desire so fierce and pure it made one shake, all on the force of a word.
