We’ve collected the best Poet Quotes from the greatest minds of the world: Alice Eve, Salman Rushdie, Laurence Olivier, Andrew Motion, Derek Walcott. Use them as an inspiration.
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I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don’t make many films about the world of a poet.
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I’d like people to remember me for a diligent expert workman. I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God’s a workman. I don’t think there’s anything better than a workman.
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As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that… That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.
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My dad‘s a photographer, and my sister is a writer and a poet. My little brother is a mandolin player – he’s a bluegrass musician. It’s always been a part of the family.
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My mom is Irish. She is a poet and a humanitarian who believed in ensuring that people around her had a better life.
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I’m not trying to be a poet on Twitter; I’m trying to be aware of the fact that a very simple sentence, well written, can have a very moving effect without that person knowing why. There’s a deep genetic part of you that somehow, even without your permission, recognizes good language when it arrives.
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What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
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I think of myself as a poet. I grew up with poetic influences – what I know from my background is the bardic poetry, which came down through oral tradition.
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Prose is admittedly an art rooted in social intercourse, and a fiction writer is faster to find a common denominator with his cell mates than a poet is.
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It always has been and forever will be impossible for slavery or any kind or form of injustice to produce a great poet.
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My poet’s heart gives me strength to face political problems, particularly those which have a bearing on my conscience.
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Jose Marti, known as ‘the Apostle of Cuban Independence,’ was an influential poet, journalist, and political theorist who became a symbol for the Cuban people’s bid for independence. The concepts of freedom, liberty, and self-determination feature prominently in his work.
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The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.
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Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.
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I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming out of the music world, the two of them.
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There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.
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The degree in which a poet’s imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
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Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it’s reflected in his writings.
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Being a poet, the advantages of dyslexia are many, affording me sensitivity to the musical nuances of language and the ability to juggle complicated ideas and narratives simultaneously.
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Why is the feeling of insecurity so prevalent in this field? Because the actor is such a dependent person on other people. If I am a painter, poet, composer, I am not really dependent on others.
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I call what I do ‘modal structures.’ Sometimes they’re songs, sometimes they’re longer, sometimes they’re this mantra – I’ve never called myself a spoken word poet.
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But Racine’s extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great psychologist.
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But here’s the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.
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I’m a fiction writer, and I do write essays, but I am not a poet. And I absolutely reject the phrase ‘woman writer’ as anti-feminist. I wrote an essay about this as far back as 1977, at the height of the neo-feminist movement.
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By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been.
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I wrote an ITV drama in the 1960s, a satire on management theory that starred Leonard Rossiter. I’m also a poet and have had work in the ‘Spectator.’
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When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn’t worth reading.
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My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
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The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.
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So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.
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Life as a poet and actor truly became full circle as I stood on stage as host of ‘Verses & Flow’ and lived in both of these outfits. It was one of the best experiences of my professional life.
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I’m not literary, and I’m not academic, and I don’t think like a poet, so my stuff will never be like that.
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Poets are always making waves. I mean, you know, in an ideal situation, the ideal republic can’t tolerate poets because – it isn’t that they mutter and criticize; it is that the poet does not accept the situation called the ‘perfect’ condition of man – in other words, perfect in the materialistic sense.
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Just after graduation in 1966, like many of my contemporaries, I applied for research training at the National Institutes of Health. Perhaps because his wife was a poet, Ira Pastan agreed to take me into his laboratory, despite my lack of scientific credentials.
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Back in those early days when I began my apprenticeship as a poet, I also tried to voice our anger, spirit of defiance and resistance in a Jamaican poetic idiom.
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I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.
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A poem is a naked person… Some people say that I am a poet.
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Poetry itself is music. I’m just lucky that I can convert it into music. William Blake is my favorite poet of all time, and he said that he wasn’t quite familiar with the sounds of music. If so, he would have been a musician. All of his poems are all like songs, and that’s how I always try to start my thoughts.
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The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds – how many human aspirations are realized in their free, holiday-lives, and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!
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But you have to understand that I consider myself a very modest artist, or whatever, and not of importance really at all – it is quite embarrassing to me to be asked my opinion about things. I am only a wee Scottish poet on the outside of everything.
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It has often struck me that the relation of two important members of the social body to one another has never been sufficiently considered, or treated of, so far as I know, either by the philosopher or the poet.
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My father was a rare poet. He was somebody who worked in the trenches. When he wanted to speak about social justice or gender empowerment, he spoke through his poetry.
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I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.
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He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.
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Everyone is their own kind of poet – you can’t miss it when their words are written down.
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If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.
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I love Roald Dahl, Sharon Olds, Nizar Qabbani, who is a poet, and Junot Diaz.
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The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
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It’s the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.
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But I’m too old to be written about as a young poet.
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Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge’they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.
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To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
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I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.
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Well, it’s a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it’s no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.
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Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I’ve always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.
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I am not less poet; I am more conscious of all that I am, am not, and might become.
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I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
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A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.
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The 500 years following the fall of the Western Roman Empire were dubbed by the poet Petrarch ‘dark.’ Although the 14th-century Italian was referring to a literary decline, the term caught on to denote the seemingly backward turn the Western world took with regard to religious and technological developments.
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I don’t consider myself just a rapper or just a singer. I’m a music producer, lyricist. I’m a poet as well, and acting is also a part of big entertainment.
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June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.
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I’m a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.
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A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
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My grandmother was energetic and fearless – a talented poet and songwriter. She was also interested in chemistry and history and medicine, taking care of the people in her hacienda in Mexico, delivering babies. She could have become anything, but this was the 1930s, and she was forced into an arranged marriage.
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Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She’s not a symbol.
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God is the perfect poet.
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I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet.
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Let’s detox our cluttered academic brain. That’s what the poet does. People call it daydreaming, detoxing our minds and taking care of that clutter. It’s being able to let in call letters from the poetry universe.
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There was no real poet in the band, but we tried.
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And in a way, that’s been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet – sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a while. This happens to everybody.
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Every great architect is – necessarily – a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
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The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.
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I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.
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I once said a poet has the right to sing as loudly and vocally as he wants to. Most poets should face a rock n’ roll audience for one night to keep them honest.
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I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.
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American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
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An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses about the truths of the mind or of things.
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It is enough for a poet to be the guilty conscience of his age.
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I think some period drama can be quite alienating, but ‘Downton’ isn’t. This is going to sound quite, um, pretentious, but someone said that it’s like a soap written by a poet.
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I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.
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The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren’t so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he’s a poet in black and white.
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A man may be variously accomplished, and yet be a feeble poet.
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The poet is primarily a spokesman, making statements or incantations on behalf of himself or others – usually for both, for it is difficult to speak for oneself without speaking for others or to speak for others without speaking for oneself.
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When Castro was put on trial in 1953 by Batista’s government and asked who was intellectually responsible for his first attempt at insurrection, he dropped the name of the poet Jose Marti.
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I’m not a journalist; I’m a poet.
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My mother was an actress and a director, as well. And my father was a playwright and poet.
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I earn more than I thought I would when I became a poet.
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In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don’t understand.
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The word poet literally means maker: anything which is not well made doesn’t exist.
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Poets these days, like artists and composers, have won for themselves almost unlimited freedom. You can pass yourself off as a painter without being able to draw, as a composer without being conscious of key relationships, and as a poet without making yourself familiar with traditional verse forms.
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Nostalgia is a sweet place for a poet and writer to be in. But it’s an indulgence; a distraction. You can’t live in a distraction.
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A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered.
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The poet’s perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely.
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My dad was a poet. He saw the world through unique glasses, with simplicity, spirituality, and humor.
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A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don’t get it, I’m not sure why you are doing it.
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I’m a poet, first and foremost as a writer. That’s who I am. That’s what I’m most comfortable writing.
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A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
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I’ve worked throughout California as a poet: in colleges, universities, worker camps, migrant education offices, continuation high schools, juvenile halls, prisons, and gifted classrooms.
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No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.
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No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.
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I made myself into a poet because it was the first thing I really loved. It was an act of will.
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I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry.
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I didn’t start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.
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Edgar Allan Poe, I think he’s a brilliant poet. I was actually given a copy of his work when I was, like, 8 years old that was my grandfather‘s, and I still carry it around with me.
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Basho is the great poet of Japan, writing in the second half of the 17th century, but his work is still incredibly fresh.
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A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.
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A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
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As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug‘s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
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I think the artistic side of architecture was natural to me. My mother was an artist and a poet.
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You can say, ‘I am a poet, rock-climbing shaman, and my name is Hiawatha Moonbeam,’ and people in America will say, ‘Hey, that’s great. All power to you, man’.
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To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.
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I consider myself kind of a reporter – one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.
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When American poet Alice Notley was very young, she used to sit in front of the radio and just listen. When she got older, she began to hear words and songs in her head everywhere she went – songs she loved, like ‘Begin the Beguine’ by Cole Porter, and her own words that sometimes tumbled out into poems.
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To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.
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I believe the poet shouldn’t be in the poem at all except as a lens or as ears.
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They think I’m going to be a schoolteacher but I’m going to be a poet.
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The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.
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The poet’s expression of joy conceals his despair at not having found the reality of joy.
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Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist.
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As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.
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Pakistan is heir to an intellectual tradition of which the illustrious exponent was the poet and philosopher Mohammad Iqbal. He saw the future course for Islamic societies in a synthesis between adherence to the faith and adjustment to the modern age.
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Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
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No bad man can be a good poet.
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All that I am is me. So I’m not really a poet or a writer or an actor or an activist; I’m me, and these are things that I do.
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It’s a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
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Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth – the true poet is very near the oracle.
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Every revolutionary poet or lyricist has been criticised for something. If you come up with something new, there will always be people who will object to it.
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Are you really going to see Lewis? One of the few people it’s worth getting excited over, I think. I know he is a good poet. I daresay he never heard of me, but I wish you would tell him that his work is the joy of my life.
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My biggest influence is Tupac. He was a poet, and listening to Tupac is what inspired me to start rapping.
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I’ve always considered myself a poet in everything that I do, whether it’s photography or movie-making.
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Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?
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My brother told me I was going to be a poet. I had a good brother. He did a lot of good brotherly work.
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Oh, I’m a pretty bad poet. This has been corroborated by others.
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According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.
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A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.
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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, ‘Truth is the daughter of Time.’
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To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.
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I shall, in due time, be a Poet.
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The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.
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And muse on Nature with a poet’s eye.
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The way to praise a poet is to write a poem.
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Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.
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I’ve never read a political poem that’s accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
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It is not just shameful for a contemporary American poet to use rhymes, it is unthinkable. It seems banal to him; he fears banality worse than anything, and therefore, he uses free verse – though free verse is no guarantee against banality.
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Sport in itself has this power. If you are a poet or a singer, people gravitate. I may not be in the same category, but I will make a comparison with Bob Marley. So it isn’t just cricket where social commentary plays a huge part.
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A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so.
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The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
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It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
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I’m a political poet – let us say a ‘human’ poet, a poet that’s concerned with the plight of people who suffer. If words can be of assistance, then that’s what I’m going to use.
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The most original sin is not the thinker‘s but the poet’s.
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A paranoiac like a poet, is born, not made.
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The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life.
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If you like to read, sometimes it’s interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet… Sometimes you can go looking for illumination.
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I am a poet, and I speak poetically.
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Technological prescience in science fiction usually requires an author with luck. Societal prescience requires a poet.
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I’m really lucky in that I can do lots of different things. It must be really hard to just be a poet or just be a novelist – a constant cycle of effort and exhaustion and recuperation.
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Jim Longenbach, poet, critic, and my husband, is always passing along life-changing books for me to read.
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In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.
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Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
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Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
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The musician – if he be a good one – finds his own perception prompted by the poet’s perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.
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I think that that’s why artists make art – it is difficult to put into words unless you are a poet. What it takes is being open to the flow of universal creativity. The Zen artists knew this.
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I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.
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These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: Can’t live with them, or without them.
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Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.
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The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.
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There’ll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
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My father was an amateur oil painter, so some of his oil paintings were on our walls. There was one above the piano of a famous Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, playing an instrument known as a bandura. I remember that one kind of resonated with me; it was always central in the living room.
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The poet does not fear death, not because he believes in the fantasy of heroes, but because death constantly visits his thoughts and is thus an image of a serene dialogue.
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I’ve not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get… credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.
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I thought that if one wanted to be a writer, one had to write novels because I didn’t know that one could be a poet.
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My dad was the baby. When he was born they were already successful. They sent him to business school – he probably would have loved to have been a poet or a writer or something, and he was very creative.
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Kanye West is a brilliant poet and artist. He and I work in a very similar way. We feel the vibration, the power of something, and it inspires us to create, whether it is music or design. It is the same process. Working with Kanye is a joy and great privilege. In 2012, we did collaboration together.
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Always be a poet, even in prose.
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As regards literary culture, it fascinates me that it has been so resilient to the Union. For example, when T.S. Eliot wanted to become poet in these lands, it wasn’t as an English poet, it was an Anglian poet he wanted to be.
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Novelist and poet David Huddle is a quiet but fabulous writer, and he does adolescent longing better than anyone I know.
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I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.
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The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects.
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I think there’s a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that’s a beautiful line.
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I began as a journalist for my pocketbook and a poet for my soul.
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But the lover’s power is the poet’s power. He can make love from all the common strings with which this world is strung.
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I really wanted to be a poet – until I realized that I really didn’t have what it took to be a poet.
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Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.
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I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.
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A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
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One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.
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One of my favorite artists is Tom Waits, whom most people think of as a wonderful singer-songwriter and a great poet. I certainly think of him that way, but I also know him as a terrific actor. You know, that persona that he puts on when he’s doing his music comes from being an actor, figuring out a persona.
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None merits the name of Creator but God and the poet.
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I didn’t feel like I was allowed to be a songwriter. I thought I had to be a really intelligent lyricist, like a poet.
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None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
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Auden is a poet – no, the poet – of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas.
388
When you see the poet laureate saying that every child should have read ‘Ulysses’ and that you’re just giving up on children if you think it’s elitist – does that include children with special needs or whose first language isn’t English?
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I see myself as a songwriter and a poet.
392
I became an electrician after high school. But I always had this thing in me to write. But it was always a little shameful. To say you were a poet was saying you were kind of crazy, and I carried that around for a long time. I still kind of carry that. And I think it might be true, actually.
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I read a very romantic book when I was young, when I was in college: Rilke’s ‘Letters to a Young Poet.’ And I’ve always felt that if you are in any kind of an artistic, creative endeavor, and you feel there’s something else you can do for a living and be happy, I think you should do something else.
395
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The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear.
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For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.
400
Everyone his own cinematographer. His own stream-of-consciousness e-mail poet. His own nightclub DJ. His own political columnist. His own biographer of his top-10 friends!
401
I think Don Henley is a brilliant contemporary rock writer. He would have been a fabulous poet if he weren’t a musician. He was a literary major, and not only that – he’s gifted with a brilliant voice. To me, Don could sing the New York City Yellow Pages and I’d buy it. I just love the sound of his voice.
402
I know when I go to a poetry reading, I feel purged, exulted. You let the poet guide you through some kind of journey.
403
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I’ve always tried to be a poet more than anything else. I mean, professional musicians die.
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I never meant to be a full-time poet: I started out as a gardener, an ideal job for a poet because your head is left free.
408
I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.
409
If, at a party, I say I’m a poet, people have a hard time responding, almost as if I’d said I’m a priest.
410
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My working habit is to separate my aims as a painting from my aims as a poet. They come from very different places and ultimately lead me to very different places… I’ll leave what I mean by ‘places’ ambiguous.
413
I’m a huge fan of Toni Morrison. I just think she’s so incredible. And also Nayyirah Waheed, who’s a poet.
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Once I stop being a citizen of the U.S.S.R., I will not stop being a Russian poet.
417
The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.
418
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There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.
420
The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.
421
What’s funny about the slacker thing, people project an image of what they think a musician is: young, slack, unemployed – like a really romantic idea of a poet, writer or musician – which isn’t really true a lot of the time. I don’t reckon you would know anything about me if I wasn’t moderately hard-working.
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The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
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Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn’t think I could understand poetry; I didn’t think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.
430
I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he’s a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.
431
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My father is a poet, my stepmother is a poet, and so I always had encouragement as a child to write.
433
A poet ought not to pick nature’s pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
434
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The poet complains or points out the discontent that lies at the heart of man, the individual man, and how can that be redeemed?
436
The writer, the poet, the novelist, are all creators. This does not mean that they invent language; it means that they use language to create beauty, ideas, images. This is why we cannot do without them.
437
A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.
438
I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter – or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then.
439
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When I came back to New York, it was such a joke because I was always referred to as the pure young poet who wasn’t in it for what he could get out of it. And all of a sudden, the pure young poet comes back… and I’m hanging out with the Rolling Stones.
442
This is just rap. I’m not trying to make people think I’m some sort of scientific wizard or inspirational poet.
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I’m a poet.
445
I used to write a lot of songs. I was an English major in college. I was a deluded poet for a year. Totally deluded.
446
I always thought I was going to be a great poet, and go and live in New York, where the great poets lived – you know, where Whitman had walked the streets.
447
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I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.
449
The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
450
To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.
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Everything on this record is what I really wanted to say, and I’m back to being the poet I always thought I was.
453
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Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet.
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My dedication to trying to be a poet started very, very young, and I was very well encouraged by good teachers and by older friends and so on, so I think it is a benediction, and I also think it is a calling, a duty.
457
At the age of 15, a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how I replied that I wanted to be a poet.
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And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.
460
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I feel that I’m a poet first. Not only was poetry the first genre in which I wrote, it’s the genre that serves as the basis for my practice as a writer.
462
There’s this poet named Walter Benton, I really like his stuff. He always uses landscapes as a metaphor for the female body.
463
I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.
464
I always turn to Frank O’Hara and David Berman’s ‘Actual Air,’ which came out in 1999. He’s a poet I haven’t tired of.
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I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.
467
Married or unmarried, young or old, poet or worker, you are still a dreamer, and will one time know, and feel, that your life is but a dream.
468
I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.
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Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a ‘poet.’ After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.
471
‘Therefore’ is a word the poet must not know.
472
A good rapper is an amazing thing to me. It’s like a 17th-, 18th-century poet.
473
A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.
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I’ve always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don’t think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.
476
The poet craves emotion, and feeds the fire that consumes him, and only under this condition is he baptized with creative power.
477
The poet nothing affirmeth and therefore never lieth.
478
It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.
479
I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows – except us – that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet.
480
I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
481
I’ve been a character actress right from the beginning. I was no more like ‘Cinderella‘ in my real life than I was like the neurotic poet in ‘Cop.’
482
You don’t have to be a poet, you don’t have to be a politician or be in the White House to make an impact with your words. We all have this capacity to find solutions for the future.
483
Bob Altman got nothing from the TV series ‘M*A*S*H,’ and the royalties for the theme song went to his oldest son, Michael, who wrote it as a 15-year-old poet!
484
I had grown up as an Irish poet in a country where the distance between vision and imagination was not quite as wide as in some other countries.
485
If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.
486
Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet’s job. The rest is literature.
487
I got out of Iowa all set to be a poet and a novelist, but you know what? It’s really tough to make a living as a poet.
488
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I’ve known the poet Eileen Myles since the 1990s, when I first moved to New York, and I remember seeing her walking her Pit Bull Rosie around the East Village. She had these beautiful arms and David Cassidy hair and the sort of swagger so many of the gay boys I knew wished we had. We all had crushes on her.
491
I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one’s finest work.
492
I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.
493
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A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
