Poet Quotes - Page 20

For me, a poet is someone who is 'in contact.' Someone through whom a current is passing.

The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

No man can be explained by his personal history, least of all a poet.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

He invades authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in other poets is only victory in him.

I always thought that writing poetry was in itself a political act.

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

Poetry is language trying to become bodily experience.

The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, — the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made.

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

we know by the odour that occasionally we are visited by skunks, which are not poetic but very beautiful.

Always in a foreign country, the poet uses poetry as an interpreter.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.

I approach poetry and spirituality like literary nitroglycerin -- a little can do a lot and you better damn well be careful with it.

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

Poetry to me is prayer.

I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

The poets are almost always wrong about the facts... That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth...

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.