I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain.
A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
Would you be a poet Before you've been to school? Ah, well! I hardly thought you So absolute a fool.
It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.
Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be.
I have felt at times with groups of children that I was really being what every poet would like to be - a bard in the old sense.
You're shadowed by your own dream, especially as you get older, of trying to create something that will last in poetry. And so, you're working on its behalf.
I seek a form that my style cannot discover,a bud of thought that wants to be a rose.
He wanted to be a poet,' someone else put in while Maggie hugged Tim and patted his back. 'Said he'd only lacked the words to be one.
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score.
He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.
Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.
Sometimes you have a poem that you really want to write and it never happens.
