Helen Vendler Quotes

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.

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.

Find a poet whose style you like, emulate that style, then deal with things that you know about - don't waste your time looking for your own style.' I wish I could remember who told me that, because I'd like to congraulate him. I've emulated all the old guys - Tennyson, Alexander Pope.

I remember coming upon Philip Larkin in my 20s in the early '60s and when Sylvia Plath's "Ariel" came out it knocked me off my feet.

Yes, I do write poetry. It's very therapeutic. I'm influenced by Pablo Neruda and Gulzar Saab. It's all very personal.

I can't say that I wanted to be an actress, it just happened along the way. I did not even know that I would be doing modelling but that also just happened.

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.

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

If you looked at my resume in the years leading up to Flickr, I worked in a dive shop in landlocked Arkansas; I was a starving artist. I just arrived at the thing I love to do accidentally.

Everything in my life happened by coincidence. Even my role in 'Delhi Belly.'

I feel secure in my life, and I'm happy with where I'm at. I realise in some ways how enchanted my life's been. I could have ended up on a bench outside Stoke station begging for money. I was one of the lucky ones.

One of my very favourite poets was a Massachusetts poet named Robert Lowell.

When I started writing poetry, it was always in very hip-hop influenced spaces: Someone would teach a Nas song side-by-side with a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, and we'd talk about the connections between those things.

Sometimes, things just fall into your lap, and that's pretty incredible.

I feel blessed. I never wanted to be an actor. It just happened all by chance and fate. I was studying to be a teacher.

I was very lucky to be in the right place at the right time and play with Michael Jordan.

It's a common notion that if you like Tagore, then he must have had an influence on your life. While I like Tagore's poetry and his thoughts, he doesn't influence my work.

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.

Serendipity is when you find things you weren't looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult.

Through all permutations and youthful poetry, I came to believe that the film actor was the great "literateur" of his time.

For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing.

I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost...but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.

A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre; the realization of it, for destiny.