Poet Quotes - Page 10

Poetry is an act of peace.

Only in Russia poetry is respected - it gets people killed.

Cold hearts don't bleed. Still they pray for eternity, never seeing tomorrow.

Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.

Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:/ To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven.

At the outset, it is only liking, not understanding, that matters. Gaps in understanding ... are not only important, they are perhaps even welcome, like clearings in the woods, the better to allow the heart's rays to stream out without obstacle. The unlit shadows should remain obscure, which is the very condition of enchantment.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can only be a footnote.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

In this most Christian of worlds all poets are Jews.

Every poet has a certain amount of "stuff." That's what you draw from for imagery. The more stuff you know well, not simply intellectually but sensually, emotionally, intimately, the wider the pool from which you draw.

The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.

It is never what a poem says that matters, but what it is.

A poet must be a professor of the five senses and must open doors among them.

Treat your audience like poets and geniuses and they’ll have the chance to become them.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.

One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination. The Divine Vision.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.

Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.

A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.

But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.