I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.
A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
(1)BEING A POET is like opening a car door & exposing yourself. (2)BEING A GOOD POET is like opening the door & exposing the passenger as well.
John Keating: There's a time for daring and there's a time for caution, and a wise man understands which is called for.
John Keating: [the class hesitates to rip out the introduction page] It's not the Bible, you're not gonna go to Hell for this.
John Keating: Phone call from God. If it had been collect, that would have been daring!
Dalton: Gentlemen, what are the Four Pillars? Dalton, Meeks, Neil, Knox, Todd Anderson: Travesty. Horror. Decadence. Excrement.
John Keating: I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself. Nolan: At these boys' age? Not on your life!
Knox: The point, Charlie... is... that she was thinking about me. I've only met her once, and already she's thinking about me.
John Keating: Mr. Anderson! Don't think that I don't know that this assignment scares the hell out of you, you mole!
Dr. Hagar: That wouldn't be a radio in your lap would it Mr. Pitts? Pitts: No sir, science experiment... radar!
Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time.
When you are very angry, don't go to a lawyer; when you are very hungry, don't be a poet.
The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of...
Hazel blue anemone in a little SeaSide cave...drawing currents from the sea turquoise blue on sparkling waves. In ocean dreams, the poet waits by his grotto, passing days. Rhyming verse, his mind creates where his smiling Sea Nymph plays. The lapping...
So stark ist der Zauber der Musik und, immer mächtiger werdend, musste er jede Fessel einer andern Kunst zerreißen." ( )
The City is free of sin The snow has given it absolution A man who slips A horse that falls Oh no, the city is in a nightgown
An unknown force is calling me Perhaps the voice of that star perched on the last height Perhaps the desire to see the spaces that conceal Europe
[poems are] crystals deposited after the effervescent contact of the spirit with reality. (cristaux deposes apres l'effervescent contact de l'esprit avec la realite)
Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.
Rain" Oh amiable rain Washer of trees and roofs who has prepared them for the pink ray of evening ("Poems")
