Jim wanted to be known as a poet, first and foremost.
Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
Dickinson is my hero because she was a joker, because she would never explain, because as a poet she confronted pain, dread and death, and because she was capable of speaking of those matters with both levity and seriousness. She's my hero because she was a metaphysical adventurer.
I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.
I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.
I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry.
But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.
Dante Alighieri is a universal poet, and great creators, they are writing for everybody always. Every single verse is very moving, and the beauty - if we don't understand, we just stay listening to the sound and it's like hearing music.
Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge'they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.
An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.
Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether, the trick they miss is that being called this thing, with the weight of tradition behind it, and with the association of the Royal family, does allow you to have conversations and to open doors, and wallets, for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow.
When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.
None merits the name of Creator but God and the poet.
Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.
So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Prose is admittedly an art rooted in social intercourse, and a fiction writer is faster to find a common denominator with his cell mates than a poet is.
Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children's future.
'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.
The antagonism between the poet and the politician has generally been evident in all cultures.
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.
Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.
Poesy must not be drawn by the ears: it must be gently led, or rather, it must lead, which was partly the cause that made the ancient learned affirm it was a divine, and no human skill, since all other knowledges lie ready for any that have strength of wit; a poet no industry can make, if his own genius be not carried into it.
The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.
A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered.
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
When the theater gates open, a mob pours inside, and it is the poet's task to turn it into an audience.
A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.
The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects.
To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men.
I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.
