Poets are far rarer birds than kings.
Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.
People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.
You puff the poets of other days, The living you deplore. Spare me the accolade: your praise Is not worth dying for.
Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.
There are two types of poets: People who write poetically about their lives, and poets that live poetically and write about it.
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 America they make too much fuss of poets; in London they make too little.
God makes many poets, but he only gives utterance to a few.
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.
My message is not wholly understood; only poets understand it.
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.
Lovers, Lunatics and poets are made of same stuff.
but as God said, crossing his legs, I see where I have made plenty of poets but not so very much poetry.
All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, 'Something's wrong, let's change it for the better. '
The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.
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.
It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.
Souls of poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern? Have ye tippled drink more fine Than mine host's Canary wine?