Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.
To be an Irish poet after that 19th century in which there was such a struggle toward the light, I think still will always be in the hearts of the writers of my generation and the generations before and hopefully the generations after.
Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the asronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.
Many poets. . . write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf.
Poets by Death are conquer'd but the wit Of poets triumphs over it.
You have to be a poet to know how to write a song with lyrics.
The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.
Ibn Firnas was a polymath: a physician, a rather bad poet, the first to make glass from stones (quartz), a student of music, and inventor of some sort of metronome.
Political parties are like poets, born, not made.
Genius, that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgment is cold, and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies and animates.
For within livin structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets.
I would like to be a philosopher in ancient Athens and a poet in ancient China.
The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
The poet is stepping out of the airplane.
What was said by the Latin poet of labor--that it conquers all things--is much more true when applied to impudence.
For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.
language can't be appropriated by one person, one poet. The words belong to all of us.
He invades authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in other poets is only victory in him.