Pastoral Resources

We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.

My sisters were going out with artists and poets, and eventually it was the creative world which attracted me.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

I do not think men have more talent. There are a great many women in the arts; novelists, painters, sculptors, poets-but the proportion is far lower in the field of song writing.

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart's the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

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

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

Another one of the old poets, whose name has escaped my memory at present, called Truth the daughter of Time.

Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.

As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.

They say poets write mostly for themselves; if anyone else likes it, well and good, if not, it doesn't matter; certainly, not to me.

Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.

Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time.

The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business. The greater the 'genius' of the personage, the greater the profit.

While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us.

I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop.

I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.

I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.