Joseph Brodsky Quotes

That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people.

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.

It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.

Of course, I have to consider that I've written a lot of prose, but I do in my heart think of myself as being originally, and still primarily, a poet.

The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

You have to write some poetry, first of all, to decide if you can become a lyricist. I was born in a family of poets.

I've always had the wish, the need, and the obsession to become a public poet.

I guess the thing that I'm most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It's the source of my creativity.

There's something about the shape that a poem takes in my mind before I write it that has to do with suddenness.

I chose poetry. Actually, poetry chose me.

It's been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they've got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all.

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.

Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.

I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.

A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

Alice Oswald. With Hughes and Heaney gone, people are looking around for the best British and Irish poets. Oswald is one of our finest.

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.

I don't think that I ever believed that poetry would be a career. I have always thought of poems as something more private than professional... I would never introduce myself as a poet. I will always have some other thing that I am.