The man slips along the stoically congealed houses Perpendicular like them A moving ornament Burning fiction His fragility contradicts the duration of his torments
Do you remember the long orphanage of the train stations We crossed cities that turn-tabled all day And vomited at night the sunshine of the day ("The Voyager")
Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were ...
You don't sound like a scientist; you sound like a poet." Rey smiled. "Can I be both?" "But you'd rather be a poet." "Who wouldn't?" he said.
I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.
Papa thought that any book worth reading twice was worth owning. So instead of buying desserts, we bought books.
That the stars guide us, but do not compel us. It is our free will that determines the outcome of all things. God does impose his will on us, rather he makes it known and allows us to choose if we will follow it.
Prose fills a space, like a liquid poured in from the top, but poetry occupies it, arrays itself in formation, sets up camp and refuses to budge.
The Greeks, those originators of the intellectual life, fixed for us the idea of the poet. He was a divine man; more sacred than the priest, who was at best an intermediary between men and the gods, but in the poet the god was present and spoke.
Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.
I was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about!
The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.
As the poet has expected, the alarms now are sounded, for - and it must be said again - the birth of a poet is always a threat to the existing cultural order, because he attempts to break through the circle of literary castes to reach the center.
The poet believed that 'Beauty' first entered the world not at its creation, nor with the first garden, the first sunrise, the birth of the first man and woman and their first sexual act. The poet believed that 'Beauty' entered the world the day the ...
When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.
A poet has to be a bit childlike at heart, and in that sense all the romantic stereotypes about poets being "eternal children", etc, are all accurate. They believe, whatever they may say, that art and words can change the world.
No poet is required to write in stanzas, or indeed in regular forms at all. Coleridge's 'Dejection: An Ode' has a rhyme scheme and sequence of long and short lines that goes without regular pattern, following the mood and whim of the poet. Such a for...
The 1960s was a period when writers in the West began to be aware of the extraordinary eloquence and popular attraction of the Russian poets such as Yevtushenko and Voznesensky - oppositional figures who could draw crowds. The Russian poets recited f...
Dalton: [answering phone] Welton Academy, hello. Yes he is, just a moment. Mr. Nolan, it's for you. It's God. He says we should have girls at Welton.
John Keating: Language was developed for one endeavor, and that is - Mr. Anderson? Come on, are you a man or an amoeba? [pause] John Keating: Mr. Perry? Neil: To communicate. John Keating: No! To woo women!
Hopkins: [reading his poem] "The cat sat on the mat" John Keating: Congratulations, Mr. Hopkins. You have the first poem to ever have a negative score on the Pritchard scale.
