Charles Bukowski Quotes

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.

And in a way, that's been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet - sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a while. This happens to everybody.

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

In college, I was a huge fan of 'Les Miserables.' I seem to remember that people who were into French literature preferred Hugo's poetry.

I really love poetry. I'm a big E.E. Cummings fan and a big Walt Whitman fan, and I have a big book of poetry.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.

Rarely do you meet an American who knows his Wordsworth.

I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.

I went to the Lake District to see what kind of a country it could be that would produce a Wordsworth.

I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.

The artist is inherently a romantic to some degree, and as such, I believe in a muse. But I don't try to analyze too much where it comes from.

I always turn to Frank O'Hara and David Berman's 'Actual Air,' which came out in 1999. He's a poet I haven't tired of.

When I was a teenager I fell in love with TS Eliot.

I have many influences and poets whose work I love. My personal canon includes Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Stevens, Duncan and Barbara Guest - and many living poets as well.

All men owe honor to the poets - honor and awe; for they are dearest to the Muse who puts upon their lips the ways of life.

What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,--for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.