Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Sculptors, poets, painters, musicians-they're the traditional purveyors of Beauty. But it can as easily be created by a gardener, a farmer, a plumber, a careworker.
Walt Whitman is the only great modern poet who does not seem to experience discord when he faces his world. Not even solitude - his monologue is a universal chorus.
The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
It was an epiphany when I realized you don't have to call yourself a linguist, a translator, a poet. You can call yourself an artist and you can do all these things.
Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!
Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.
We met with the poet Frank O'Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings.
I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.
The poet casts an eye on what is horrendous, but his truest life is in what sustains, restores, heals. Love, the act of loving, beauty, are first, fundamental truths.
Today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets from society because we refuse to admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.
No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.
I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.
The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, 'A civilization is judged only in its decline.' That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players.
Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?
To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.
I treat myself as one of the sources. And, again, I think that’s accurate. One of the poets I read most frequently is myself. I really do. I read my own poems obsessively.
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.
I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.
Is encouragement what the poet needs? Open question. Maybe he needs discouragement. In fact, quite a few of them need more discouragement, the most discouragement possible.
A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.
What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.
What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.
If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.
There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn't also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this.
Jean Valentine and Jane Cooper were my professors at Sarah Lawrence College - and they were uncompromised in their art. They gave me models of how to live one's life as a poet.
To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.
What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.
All I ask, is the privilege for my masculine part the poet in me.... If I must not, because of my sex, have this freedom... I lay down my quill and you shall hear no more of me.
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.
Someone told me just recently that poets are eulogists. It's their job, to eulogize. I didn't know that, but it makes sense. Because in almost every poem of mine there is a loss.
When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience ?in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
There is scarcely anything to which I am so feelingly alive as the honour and welfare of my country, and, as a poet, I have no higher enjoyment than singing her sons and daughters.
Someone in Ireland asked me how many Republican poets there were in the U.S., and I thought maybe two. Maybe there are 10,000 poets, and maybe there are two Republicans among them.
For me personally, I love art and artists of all mediums and we've seen madness is more often than not present in the greatest painters, poets, writers, and songwriters in history.
I hear poetry whenever I turn on the radio. Eminem is a better poet than just about everybody. He's better than Billy Collins; he's better than Richard Wilbur; he's better than me.
The poet resists the pressures of reality, including the pressures of violence, in making, in forming, the poem. The tension is in the resistance - the poem is an act of resistance.
You have to put yourself to one side and get away from the 'Victorian poet' model where you are the universe. You have to do everything you can to take your ego out of the equation.
A starry sky is equally interesting to a scientist, a mystic, an ethics scholar, and a poet. Looking at the stars, each experiences something different, and each sees his own picture.
I'd like to imagine that "dreamoir" becomes a subgenre of nonfiction, maybe ultimately because I'd love to read many more dreamoirs by other writers - poets and memoirists especially.
Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.
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.
I'm about fifty years behind as far as my preferences go and I must say that the poets who excite me most are the Americans. There are very few contemporary English poets that I admire.
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!
My life all-around is really different than a lot of other poets. Not poets that are parents, too, but just that I can hardly find anyone who works in the industries that I've worked in.
Imagination, which is the Eldorado of the poet and of the novel-writer, often proves the most pernicious gift to the individuals who compose the talkers instead of the writers in society.
Happy the poet who with ease can steer From grave to gay, from lively to severe. [Lat., Heureux qui, dans ses vers, sait d'une voix legere Passer du grave au doux, du plaisant au severe.]
I've worked throughout California as a poet: in colleges, universities, worker camps, migrant education offices, continuation high schools, juvenile halls, prisons, and gifted classrooms.