You know it already that each one of us is the effect of the infinite past; the child is ushered into the world not as something flashing from the hands of nature, as poets delight so much to depict, but he has the burden of an infinite past; for good or evil he comes to work out his own past deeds
Our earliest poets were shamans. Today, as in the earliest times, true shamans are poets of consciousness who know the power of song and story to teach and to heal.
I hear poets complaining: 'We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that. '
There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about "finding your own voice as a poet", which I suppose means that you come out from under the direct influence of other poets and have perhaps found a way to combine those influences so that it appears to be your own voice.
Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
And I myself a Catholic will be, So far at least, great saint, to pray to thee. Hail, Bard triumphant! and some care bestow On us, the Poets militant below.
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
Pain makes hens and poets cackle.
Lazy poets try to elicit a reader's response with words designed to tug at the heart.
Poets. . . are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.
Being a poet in the States is quite different from being one in China, because in the States poetry depends on the universities for its support. They finance the poets and help them get published. That isn't so in China. But overall it is the same. You can't change society with poetry.
Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.
Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.
Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.
I think that as poets, we can get away with stuff because we can ride on the melt of metaphor. We cover a lot of terrain psychically and temporally and linguistically via metaphor, and that can be a stand-in for an argument, whereas in prose, you have to make the argument, and you have to be convincing because the sequence must make sense in time and purpose.
Keelhaul the poets in the vestry chairs.
The dust comes secretly day after day, Lies on my ledge and dulls my shining things. But O this dust I shall drive away Is flowers and kings, Is Solomon's temple, poets, Nineveh.
Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline. . . We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers.