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Poet Quotes

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Poet Quotes

“Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion.”

“And I never thought this life was possible,You're the yellow bird that I've been waiting for. In polaroids you were dressed in women's clothes Were you made ashamed, why'd you lock them in a drawer? Well, I don't think that I ever loved you more Well let the poets cry themselves to sleep And all their tearful words will turn back into steam The sound of loneliness makes me happier.”

“If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.”

“Poet, forger of ideals, dreamer among the possibilities of life, prophet of the millenium, do you get impatient with the prosaic life around you -- the dulness, and the earthliness, and the brutishness of men? Fret not. Go forward into the realm which stretches before you; climb the highest mountain you can reach, and plant a cross there. The nations will come up to it some day. Work for immortality if you will; then wait for it. If your own age fail to recognize you, a coming age will not.”

“You can publish a poem you think is a very important poem, and you don't hear a word from anyone. [...] You can publish a book of poetry by dropping it off a cliff and waiting to hear an echo. Quite often, you'll never hear a thing. So doing that, using older work, puts it in a context, and that sort of forces the reader to realize what its importance is-if it has any. Everything needs a context. You're not going to recognize a poet unless you have a context.”

“What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry - but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.”

“One of my favorite artists is Tom Waits, whom most people think of as a wonderful singer-songwriter and a great poet. I certainly think of him that way, but I also know him as a terrific actor. You know, that persona that he puts on when he's doing his music comes from being an actor, figuring out a persona.”

“I think, as poets, we are in the odd position of constantly defending our art form. Which is funny and also sort of invigorating, too. No one really says, "Oh you're a lawyer? I've never understood the law. In fact, I kind of hate it." Or, "Oh you wait tables? I didn't know that was something people did." I say it can be invigorating because, on some level, we have to evaluate what we do and why we do it almost daily. We have to explain ourselves to people all the time. We have to say, "Yes, I am a unicorn, believe in me."”