Quotes About Poetry

I can't look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do.

I'm very proud of the fact that I'm one of Britain's biggest selling poets. That gives me a huge amount of pleasure.

Poets, I think, are born. You can't teach it. It's genetic - the circumstances of how you were raised... and there's probably some Irish in your blood lines.

At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.

The only nice poets I've ever met were bad poets, and a bad poet is not a poet at all - ergo, I've never met a nice poet.

My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country's finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

A lot of young poets today, from what I've heard and experienced, can't get their heads past George W. Bush, and I've heard so many poems about this democracy and this era of politics that I'm kind of bored by it.

It's difficult to get films made, especially films about poets.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

But there is some way in which poets believe that and this is dangerous, too believe that their calling gives them a certain freedom. A certain freedom to live in a free way.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

I feel very connected to poets across the country.

There are very few great poets in the world.

The way I process things, they way I express myself, is in comics, just as poets process things that they are trying to understand.

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn't some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that's happening around us.

Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one.

If you want poets in space, you'll have to wait.

Poets take themselves very seriously.

We know there are poets who are chosen: by what or whom, we no more know than what lies beyond our final breath, or what caused a certain action which resulted in the fulfillment or the desecration and collapse of what we most cared for in life.

The first movie that made me cry was 'Dead Poets Society.' That one gets me. 'O Captain! My Captain!' That moment kills me.

Even the greatest poets, I think, cannot quite get to the places that music can get to in the human - I was gonna say mind, but it's actually the entire body. It somehow seems to infuse the entire body.