Quotes About Poets

While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us.

Zen is for poets, Tibetan is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists.

Algunas veces en la noche, yo pensaba en la belleza con que los poetas estremecieron al mundo, y todo el corazón se me anegaba de pena como una boca con un grito. Pensaba en las fiestas a que ellos asistieron, las fiestas de la ciudad, las fiestas en los parajes arbolados con antorchas de sol en los jardines florecidos, y de entre las manos se caía mi pobreza.

Los poetas mexicanos (supongo que los poetas en general) detestan que se les recuerde su ignorancia.

Penso nos poetas mortos no potro de tortura, nos mortos de aids, de overdose, em todos os que acreditaram no paraíso latino-americano e morreram no inferno latino-americano.

I think of Beltrán Morales, I think of Rodrigo Lira, I think of Mario Santiago, I think of Reinaldo Arenas. I think of the poets who died under torture, who died of AIDS, or overdosed, all those who believed in a Latin American paradise and died in a Latin American hell.

Y lo que los poetas jóvenes o la nueva generación pretendía era mover el piso y llegado el momento destruir esas estatuas, salvo la de Pacheco, el único que parecía escribir de verdad, el único que no parecía un funcionario.

Then on the River I saw the dream-built ship of the god Yoharneth-Lehai, whose great prow lifted grey into the air above the River of Silence. Her timbers were olden dreams dreamed long ago, and poets' fancies made her tall, straight masts, and her rigging was wrought out of the people's hopes. Upon her deck were rowers with dream-made oars, and the rowers were the people of men's fancies, and princes of old story and people who had died, and people who had never been.

Exactly right—folded quietly and knitted in right along with the working DNA there is a shadow self. This won't surprise poets. We carry our own genetic doubles, at least in part.

I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods.

all over India policemen were arresting people, all opposition leaders except members of the pro-Moscow Communists, and also schoolteachers lawyers poets newspapermen trade-unionists, in fact anyone who had ever made the mistake of sneezing during the Madam's speeches

if human nature were not a mystery, we'd have no need of poets.

A stress on the system and I think a painful thing for many young poets who are looking to find a life in poetry that they're not going to be able to find.

I only wish the poets would say this too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the the body. Ah! the misery that would be saved if we confessed that! Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul!

As a matter of fact, if either of the two men were Buckingham or Ovid or Byron, they might have respectively realized that "love is the salt of life," and "the perpetual source of fears and anxieties," and "a capricious power"—but they weren't poets, they

Poets that lasting marble seekMust carve in Latin or in Greek.

Poets lose half the praise they should have got,Could it be known what they discreetly blot.

There is a matter on my conscience which I cannot excuse but may as well confess. To deceive a maiden is a very sore thing, so sore that it had made us all hot against Constantine; but it may be doubted by a cool mind whether it is worse, nay, whether it is not more venial than to contrive the murder of a lawful wife. Poets have paid more attention to the first offence – maybe they know more about it – the law finds greater employment, on the whole, in respect to the second.

In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.

Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published.

Nowadays a long Romantic tradition has caused us to think of poets as private dreamers, ill-adapted to social intercourse and the horrors of a materialist world but thereby guardians of value and the messengers of our common soul. In 1711 François senior would have viewed a young poet as a modern parent might view an aspirant television celebrity.

It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.

artists look at what is, what they can see, and they draw it. Poets never trust the surface. They learn to look beneath, and to trust what they can't see.