With you as an inspiration, a painter will create his best painting, a writer will write his best literature and a poet will create his best poetry.
Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.
I started to think about the abyss that separates the poet from the reader and the next thing I knew I was deeply depressed.
At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.
That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.
As artists give themselves to their models, and poets to their classical pursuits, so must we addict ourselves to prayer.
On a small table beside his chair were other haphazardly stacked volumes by such poets as Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, a dangerous crew to let into your head.
Repetita iuvant. Italy, a land of great saints, poets, sailors, artists, statesmen, businessmen, lawyers, intellectuals, professors, journalists, whores, gangsters, religious parasites and dickheads.
Scholars, theologians, and even poets have yet to be able to truly describe and touch upon the beauty, romance, and magic of a relationship built on 100% authenticity
That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us
It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own.
I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.
But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.
In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.
Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues.
There are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them... Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?
A great ancient poet was blind. A great classical composer was deaf. Many of us are dumb. What have we to show for it?
Come to the edge, He said. They said: We are afraid. Come to the edge, He said. They came. He pushed them, And they flew . . ." — Guillaume Apollinairet French poet
And what is the problem? It is the old problem of the anxious searcher - the mythic in the interior castle, the poet-pilgrim in a dark wood not sure how to proceed. Which way is the right way?
The bards sing of love, they celebrate slaughter, they extol kings and flatter queens, but were I a poet I would write in praise of friendship.
Fact is not truth, but a poet who willfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.
