We need knew knights, but without swords.

Teaching others, he corrected himself.

What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means suffering.

A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.

A true poet is one who can appreciate the disciplines and structures of any and all styles of poetry.

I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred...

The eclipses ofpoets are not foretold in the calender.

Don’t bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

Poetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

It is kind of ridiculous that a poet is expected to live in the real world.

I live there…where the birds are infiniteeverywherewhere they fleeit’s a place your eyes can wanderbut never seeWhere everyone accepts me,Without any pretenseIt’s a place your mind can picturebut never really comprehend.

An owl sound wandered along the road with me.I didn’t hear it–I breathed it into my ears.

The bats inebriate the sky . . .

God is busy and has no time for you.

Beyond all vanities, fights, and desires, omnipotent silence lies.

Say No! Accept the burdens of revenge.

Through words to the meaning of thoughts with no words.

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself...

Novelists invent characters; poets invent themselves.

Because who hasn’t tried to pull their arms from the sleeves of gravity’s lead coat?Who doesn’t have at least one pair of wax wings out in the garage?

Forse ogni poeta è condannato all’insoddisfazione. Dev’essere per colpa della luce che li abbaglia

A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

may this poetrybe the homeyou will someday come back to.

… the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder.

. . .criticism is to poetry as air is to a noise: it allows it to be heard; and even if we can’t see it or feel it, it is there, shaping how we hear.

Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.

He confided his deepest secret to you; be always wary of his secret.

We forget old stories, but those stories remain the same.

Procreation annihilates eternity.

I pen you words from my heartneither paper nor pen would doas I lay them out in flowery fontswhat more could you ask foras I am writing in your heartthe love that I want to...

With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a...

Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.

99% of natural poets discovered their talents through love letters.

no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.

I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the metier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim...

some words bring warmthjust bybeing next to each other.

One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.

Authority forgets a dying king

Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously...

Great poets are great copy editors.

Christ did not ask or want to be what he was not.

Universe is the Sun watching its own self.

It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that...

Miltons were, on the whole, the most enthusiastic poet followers. A flick through the London telephone directory would yield about four thousand John Miltons, two thousand William Blakes, a thousand or so Samuel Colleridges, five...

Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we’re not poets.

Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem’s power is as an instrument of...

For the way of the comets is the poet’s way.

. . . poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry’s social value.

Children picking up our bonesWill never know that these were onceAs quick as foxes on the hill;