Poet Quotes - Page 23

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

Well, write poetry, for God's sake, it's the only thing that matters.

And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous, He must die a little death each morning, He must swallow his toad and study his vomit as Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval.

Honor is the greatest poet.

Someone told me just recently that poets are eulogists. It's their job, to eulogize. I didn't know that, but it makes sense. Because in almost every poem of mine there is a loss.

He that would earn the Poet's sacred name, Must write for future as for present ages.

In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.

Poetry is the ultimate democracy.

Don't saddle me with your ideals, and spare me all your guilt. For a poet with all the answers, has never yet been built.

Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

The moment of change is the only poem.

Maybe the poets are right. Maybe love is the only answer.

Poetry fettered fetters the human race.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes...

The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.

It is interesting to note that poetry, a literary device whose very construct involves the use of words, is itself the word of choice by persons grasping to describe something so beautiful it is marvelously ineffable.

Law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience ?in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.

A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.