The American public does not know poets exist.
The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind.
I'm inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I'm good at it.
To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
I think 'Dead Poets' was probably my favorite, just to get started with the idea of doing a movie that people treated as more than a movie.
Some of my educated Filipino friends were aspiring poets, but their aspirations were all in the direction of the United States. They had no desire to learn from the bardic tradition that continued in the barrios. Their ideal would have been to write something that would get them to Iowa, where they would study creative writing.
She knows more of love than the poets can say, and her eyes offer something that won't go away.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life, I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.
I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen.
The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.
The poets' scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by death.
Rumi, who is one of the greatest Persian poets, said that the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.
And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.
Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions.
Even the greatest poets, I think, cannot quite get to the places that music can get to in the human - I was gonna say mind, but it's actually the entire body. It somehow seems to infuse the entire body.
Alice Oswald. With Hughes and Heaney gone, people are looking around for the best British and Irish poets. Oswald is one of our finest.
I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.
Some of my favorite poets had a tremendous sense of whimsy, so it's a writing style I guess I admire.
Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.
Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.
Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.
Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
It's been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they've got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all.
Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.
We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.
There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.
All poets are idlers, even if all idlers are not poets.
But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?
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.
New voices in an old art - and women poets have been that for much more than a century - do not diminish the art through the category. They enrich it. They renew it with common quandaries of craft and innovation. The category simply allows the quandaries to be seen more clearly.
All poets' wives have rotten lives Their husbands look at them like knives.
Whilst in Prussia poets only speak of the love of country as one of the dearest of all human affections, here there is no man who does not feel, and describe with rapture, how much he loves his country.
Many poets in Iran have learned to speak almost a secret language, where political issues are talked about in allegorical ways.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
