Pastoral Resources

Poets are people who can still see the world through the eyes of children.

America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.

The trouble with the performance poets is that they don't seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work.

If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.

Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.

But there is some way in which poets believe that and this is dangerous, too believe that their calling gives them a certain freedom. A certain freedom to live in a free way.

But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them.

One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.

My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.

Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.

It's easy to understand why the most beautiful poems about England in the spring were written by poets living in Italy at the time.

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.