To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.
No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.
These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: Can't live with them, or without them.
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
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's expression of joy conceals his despair at not having found the reality of joy.
Always be a poet, even in prose.
No poet or orator has ever existed who believed there was any better than himself.
It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.
I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.
Then, of course, there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown, and one has to let them go because they're just not making headway. But we have a very clear personal relationship with the authors.
People write me from all over the country, asking me, and sometimes even telling me, what they think a poet laureate should do. I found that immensely valuable.
My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.
It always has been and forever will be impossible for slavery or any kind or form of injustice to produce a great poet.
From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue.
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.
The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
Why should the composer be more guilty than the poet who warms to fantasy by a strange flame, making an idea that inspires him the subject of his own very different treatment?
There is no more reason why the features belonging to a picture should be distorted for the purpose of such imaginative suggestion than that the poet's metaphors should spoil his words for the ordinary uses of man.
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 together.
If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.
But the lover's power is the poet's power. He can make love from all the common strings with which this world is strung.
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.
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
What I want, when I write a poem, is no more than this: that it be preserved in some published form so that, in principle, someone, somewhere, will be able to find it and read it. That is all I need, as a poet, and that is the beauty, the luxury of my position. My lyric is mine and remains mine. Nobody can ruin it.
In 1967, the students at San Francisco State invited the poet Amiri Baraka to the campus for a semester. He attracted other influential black writers such as Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins, Eldridge Cleaver. What emerged was something we called the community communications program. That's how I got involved; I got involved in a little play.
The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.
I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.
You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
I once said a poet has the right to sing as loudly and vocally as he wants to. Most poets should face a rock n' roll audience for one night to keep them honest.
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.
When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.
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.
I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.
