Poets Quotes

The community of poets I belong to is not as close as it used to be, if only for the fact that our lives have become busier: jobs, children, and the like.

Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.

I think one of the things that language poets are very involved with is getting away from conventional ideas of beauty, because those ideas contain a certain attitude toward women, certain attitudes toward sex, certain attitudes toward race, etc.

Some of my favorite poets had a tremendous sense of whimsy, so it's a writing style I guess I admire.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.

I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie.

Young poets bewail the passing of love; old poets, the passing of time. There is surprisingly little difference.

I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.

Many men of science and poets have in their own manner, by various ways and means, and aided by others, sought unceasingly to create a more tolerable world for everyone.

If sexual intercourse, as the poets tell us, began in 1963, it was another decade and a half before the American political system began to take notice.

The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists.

We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.

She knows more of love than the poets can say, and her eyes offer something that won't go away.

Poets have to be sensitive to their audience, but it does not mean that they censor themselves. I realise my audience is diverse. Some will read with empathy and curiosity while others will take offense.

The Helicon of too many poets is not a hill crowned with sunshine and visited by the Muses and the Graces, but an old, mouldering house, full of gloom and haunted by ghosts.

A lot of young poets today, from what I've heard and experienced, can't get their heads past George W. Bush, and I've heard so many poems about this democracy and this era of politics that I'm kind of bored by it.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.

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.

But there is some way in which poets believe that and this is dangerous, too believe that their calling gives them a certain freedom. A certain freedom to live in a free way.

Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.

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.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.

American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.

In The Doors we have both musicians and poets, and both know of each other's art, so we can effect a synthesis.

Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.

For me rappers and dancers are poets and artists and often times the most interesting performances are given by them.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.