Biography
"Poets don't drive. Never trust a poet who can drive. Never trust a poet at the wheel. If he can drive, distrust the poems."
"Poets and anarchists are always the first to go. Where. To the frontline. Wherever it is."
"For a man to become a poet (witness Petrarch and Dante), he must be in love, or miserable."
"A great poet belongs to no country ; his works are public property, and his Memoirs the inheritance of the public."
"A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams."
"The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood."
"In this American moment, it's fundamentally queer to be a poet, to be interested in what can't be packaged or sold in the marketplace, queer to enjoy the fundamentally useless, contemplative pleasure of poetry. Queer means that which is not business as usual, not solid identities founded on firm grounds, but a world in question."
"You don't have to write anything down to be a poet. Some work in gas stations. Some shine shoes. I don't really call myself one because I don't like the word. Me? I'm a trapeze artist."
"There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. … To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food."
"Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions…"
"A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no Identity-he is continually informing and filling some other body."
"A poet doesn't always have to be good. You take Ezra Pound; he was a poet in the classic sense, he was a fine poet. Nothing wrong with his poetry except he was a Nazi. He had a different view than we did. You have a picture there of a poet, but a different type of poet."
"People ought to be grateful : I have done a great deal for the poets ; is there not one among them to do something for me ? I entreat them to recollect that I have read them, which is a great deal ; I have bought them, which is still more ; and I have reduced their theory to practice, which is most of all. They owe me a recompense, and I have a plan in my head. I want one of them to come and commit suicide in my garden, and leave a paper behind requesting to be interred in that very spot. He might assign any reason his imagination suggested, and I would take care that religious attention should be paid to his last wish ; indeed, it is for that I desire his death."
"For next to being a great poet is the power of understanding one."
"All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful."
"σοφὸς ὁ πολλὰ εἰδὼς φυᾷ."
"At any rate, at his [the God of Love] touch every man becomes a poet "though formerly unvisited by the Muse"."
"And as to the poets, those who go astray follow them."
"A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep."
"The first task of any man who would be a poet is to know himself completely; he seeks his soul, inspects it, tests it, learns it... The Poet makes himself into a seer by a long, involved and logical derangement of all the senses... The poet is really a thief of fire."
"Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young."
"A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses of Aeschylus, and the book of Job, and Dante’s “Paradise” would afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, . . . ."
"When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.—Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical."
"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
"Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely; her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden."