Robert Graves Quotes

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

As a young man, Yeats spoke to me in a way I could understand. Shakespeare I couldn't understand, but Yeats I could. It was his subject matter and also I really admired the way he put his personal life on the line.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.

The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.

Oh, I'm a pretty bad poet. This has been corroborated by others.

I don't know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets - the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from.

A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

Theodore Roethke was a poet I was raised with so he has a lot of sentimental value for me.

You don't become a poet if you want to make any money.

The most important American love poet in living memory, and certainly one of the most important American poets tout court, Robert Creeley was born in 1926 and raised in eastern Massachusetts.

In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems.

The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.

If you're well-known, you're at the risk of becoming your own character. When you're alone, as a writer, you have to be unknown, putting it all on the paper.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

I have never written out of a desire to be controversial.

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.

If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with.

When poetry is on the money, 12 words can slay you. I admire that greatly.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

Nearly all men and women are poetical, to some extent, but very few can be called poets. There are great poets, small poets, and men and women who make verses. But all are not poets, nor even good versifiers. Poetasters are plentiful, but real poets are rare. Education can not make a poet, though it may polish and develop one.

I shall, in due time, be a Poet.

I work with a lot of young people who have poems that are changing their lives, that they're eager to talk about, but every now and then when I meet someone, maybe someone of my parents' generation, and I tell them that I write poetry, they'll begin to recite something that they memorized when they were in school that has never left them.