Poet Quotes

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.

Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.

And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.

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.

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.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist.

It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.

The antagonism between the poet and the politician has generally been evident in all cultures.

All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.

I earn more than I thought I would when I became a poet.

The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.

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.

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.

In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.