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Quotations on Poets 100 Quotes Found Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind. I don't know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets - the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from. Francis Webb is easily our greatest poet and one of the greatest poets in the world but he's hardly ever mentioned. He was certainly in a confused state. I used to go and visit him in Callan Park. They were really - to me they were the best poets those two writing in those days but it wasn't very encouraging because, well, they weren't getting far were they? Intellectuals, academics, writers and poets were an important force in the early groups of volunteers. They had the means to get to Spain and were accustomed to travelling, whereas very few workers had left British shores. Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder. Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Poets have to be sensitive to their audience, but it does not mean that they censor themselves. I realise my audience is diverse. Some will read with empathy and curiosity while others will take offense. Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity. It is strange, how quickly people want to obligate their poets, as it were, on the exile. Most poets in their youth begin in adolescent sadness. I find it more rewarding to end in gladness. In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets. The American public does not know poets exist. In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness. Travelers are like poets. They are mostly an angry race. Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world. 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. I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order. Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die. Poets are people who can still see the world through the eyes of children. America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer. The trouble with the performance poets is that they don't seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work. Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings. Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words. I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us. It's easy to understand why the most beautiful poems about England in the spring were written by poets living in Italy at the time. We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace. My sisters were going out with artists and poets, and eventually it was the creative world which attracted me. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? I do not think men have more talent. There are a great many women in the arts; novelists, painters, sculptors, poets-but the proportion is far lower in the field of song writing. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words. When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart's the last part moves, her last, the tongue. Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market. Another one of the old poets, whose name has escaped my memory at present, called Truth the daughter of Time. As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum. Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science. Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time. The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business. The greater the 'genius' of the personage, the greater the profit. I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop. I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself. Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence. Poets wish to profit or to please. Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians. Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision. There are very few great poets in the world. Artist - musicians, painters, writers, poets, always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life. Many men of science and poets have in their own manner, by various ways and means, and aided by others, sought unceasingly to create a more tolerable world for everyone. Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them. The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind.
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