Pastoral Resources

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

A lot of young poets today, from what I've heard and experienced, can't get their heads past George W. Bush, and I've heard so many poems about this democracy and this era of politics that I'm kind of bored by it.

Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.

I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.

I think one of the things that language poets are very involved with is getting away from conventional ideas of beauty, because those ideas contain a certain attitude toward women, certain attitudes toward sex, certain attitudes toward race, etc.

American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.

I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself.

Poets that lasting marble seek Must come in Latin or in Greek.

Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot.

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.

I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say, your professional poets, I mean there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

All kids, when they go to school, are pretty good artists and dancers and singers and poets. All that gets buried, basically through being educated, or brainwashed.

There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.

I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.

Poets, like whores, are only hated by each other.

Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.