Poet Quotes - Page 34

I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.

A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.

The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say

And me happiest when I compose poems: Love, power, the huzza of battle are something, are much: yet a poem includes them like a pool water and reflection.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought.

As to the pure mind all things are pure, so to the poetic mind all things are poetical.

We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

Pilgrims are poets who create by taking journeys.

The reader who is illuminated is, in a real sense, the poem.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

Both the poet and scholar are trying to learn something. The poem for me is a pursuit. Some of the answers are within. Some of the answers are without.

I love poetry, be it in music or be it in Andrei Tarkovsky, Francesca Woodman or anyone else, I just love poetry.

To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.

Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.

A great poet does not express his or her self; he expresses all of our selves.

Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.

For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.

The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.

If certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.

It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.

And I'll stay off Verlaine too; he was always chasing Rimbauds.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.