Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.
A poet must be a professor of the five senses and must open doors among them.
As a poet and writer in general I feel very grateful that I can just make a chapbook and that we don't have the expenses of filmmakers.
Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.
For a poet, style is the only morality.
The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.
Advice to Young Poets Never pretend to be a unicorn by sticking a plunger on your head.
There were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworkers and the Bessemer convertor of love.
We are all of us Apollos serving some Admetus.
True myths may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blonde Hero-really look-and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. "You must change your life," he said. When the true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
Poets are never allowed to be mediocre by the gods, by men or by publishers.
Just as a musician loves music and not nightingales, and a poet loves poetry and not sunsets, a painter is not primarily a person who responds to figures and landscapes. He is primarily one who loves pictures.
There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture — that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.
We are all youthful barbarians, and only our new toys bring us excitement. That has been the sole purpose of our flights. This one flies higher, that one faster. But now we will make ourselves at home. We will forget the machine, the tool. It is no longer complex; it does what it is supposed to do, unnoticed. And through this tool we will find again the old nature, the nature of the gardener, the navigator, the poet.
Being identified as a poet in France or Denmark or India one is greeted with gracious respect.
In the end, time is the best ally of poets. It clarifies their works and makes them accessible to an ever widening circle of readers.
The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary.
Nature, like a true poet, abhors abrupt transitions.
