Poet Quotes

Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.

In nature there are few sharp lines.

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included.

If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster.

I take the walk to be the externalization of an interior seeking so that the analogy is first of all between the external and the internal.

I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.

For though we often need to be restored to the small, concrete, limited, and certain, we as often need to be reminded of the large, vague, unlimited, unknown.

Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.

Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.

A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.

Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.

I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.

I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.

Only silence perfects silence.

Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.

Yes, I think poker really isn't gambling.

When you make a bet, you're saying something.

The fact that we write about it doesn't mean we play better than ordinary players at all.

Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it's a kind of risky trade.

I'm good at reading people.

I think one of the interesting things about poker is that once you let your ego in, you're done for.

I mean to say, this is the book and I really loathe it and I can't imagine what a nice Jewish boy like me ever, how I ever got into this dreadful trade.

I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients.

I hate writing.

I could think of worse ways of going than at the poker table.

I absolutely don't believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.