Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making poets.
Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
I want to reiterate that my understanding of the poem is not the poem's core, true meaning. Once a poem goes out into the world, the poet is just one more reader.
The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.
Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains – beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.
The great post-Holocaust poet, Paul Celan, said that a poem is a message in a bottle sent out in the not always greatly hopeful belief that somewhere and some time it would wash up on land on heartland perhaps.
Master Sigmund Freud once said that wherever I go, I find a poet has been there before me. This is simply because science either walks or runs but art has wings to fly!
Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.
Always be a poet, even in prose.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
Give me a theme," the little poet cried, "And I will do my part," "'Tis not a theme you need," the world replied; "You need a heart.
About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.
A poet must be a professor of the five senses and must open doors among them.
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
The poet, like the lover, is a person unable to reconcile what he knows with what he feels. His peculiarity is that he is under a certain compulsion to do so.
There are poets and there are grownups.
Don't send a poet to London.
Words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet.
Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that, in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the perform-ance of a trained dog on very shaky ground.
