poets quotes

When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.