Poets Quotations | Page 2

During the 20th century, Chechnya was written about by local poets and novelists, as well as writers from Russia and Central Asia, but very little is available in English translation.

All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the truest poets must be truthful.

American poets have been criticized for anything you can think of. For being too English, recently for not being English enough.

I took a course at Harvard with Delmore Schwartz, a writing course, and there were about 30 of us... I don't really see vast movements full of wonderful poets all over the place.

It's not so bad for politicians and Pulitzer Prize poets and certain intellectuals in this country to sign petitions and speak out against the war in Vietnam, but when Cassius Clay did it he paid a heavy price for Freedom of Speech.

The audience for dramas has always been there in the summer. It was there for us when we opened 'Dead Poets Society.' But it's always been about having the nerve to program dramas into summer. But at least on paper, next summer looks to be more diverse.

Once I started to write prose, I certainly did not envy the poets. I've mocked poets and poetry ever since I began writing fiction.

In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they're not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature. What they're doing is simply talking back to the language itself --as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony --those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it's something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a ''read,'' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.

I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I also love more cerebral poets like H.D. and Emily Dickinson. My parents subscribed to a monthly poetry periodical, and as a teenager I was introduced to Denise Levertov, who was an influence.

In this nadir of poetic repute, when the only verse that most people read from one year's end to the next is what appears on greetings cards, it is well for us to stop and consider our poets. . . . Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.

In working on a poem,I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.

I'd photographed musicians before but this was different. Syd was very charismatic, and he had the aura of a poete maudit, which made him the perfect subject for me - I realised that rock n' rollers were the modern equivalent of all the poets I was so enamoured with.

The trouble with the performance poets is that they don't seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work.

The English kill off all their poets by the time they're forty

The greatest poem ever knownIs one all poets have outgrown:The poetry, innate, untold,Of being only four years old.

The great pleasure that comes from reading poets such as Mark Doty and Marianne Moore is the realisation that the essential virtues - compassion, wonder, humility, respect for the mysterious - are far from conventionally heroic.

And I watch my friends, most of whom are in academic life because most poets have to be in academic life, there aren't so many other ways to survive.

The community of poets I belong to is not as close as it used to be, if only for the fact that our lives have become busier: jobs, children, and the like.

There is a pleasure in poetic painsWhich only poets know.

Poets can't worry about popularity since loving humanity involves saying what some people don't want to hear.

Poets aren't very useful Because they aren't consumeful or produceful

I think it better that at times like theseWe poets keep our mouths shut, for in truthWe have no gift to set a statesman right;He's had enough of meddling who can pleaseA young girl in the indolence of her youthOr an old man upon a winter's night.

But since he died, and poets better prove,Theirs for their styleI'll read, his for his love.

There certainly are moments in history when poets and painters connect so closely as to be one and the same person,

When a man and a woman die, as poets sung, His heart's the last part moves, her last, the tongue

Violent attacks on poets by mediocre pundits are howling protest at vibrant trembling, genius that disturbed their slumber.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them

No wonder poets sometimes have to seem/ So much more business-like than business men./ Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.

By our own spirits are we deified:We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.