Poetic Authority Quotes

And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?

[The poet] must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations, as a being superior to time and place.

Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet.

One of the things women poets have been engaged in - among the other things they've been doing - is revising parts of the poetic self. Re-examining notions of the authority within the poem, and of the poem.

I know that in a poem, even when the speaker is speaking from the poet's experience, there's always something that's borrowed, some authority that sits outside of the poet that the poem has claimed. There's a dramatic pitch that makes the speaker capable of saying something more courageous or stranger or simply other than what the poet would be able to say.

Insofar as I think about postmodernism at all, and it doesn't exactly keep me awake at nights, I think of it as something that happens to one, not a style one affects. We're postmoderns because we're not modernists. The modernist writers—Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams—spoke with a kind of vatic authority: they were really the last of the Romantics, for whom authorship itself was like being a solitary prophet in the wasteland.

The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.

They (the poets) are to us in a manner the fathers and authors of the wisdom.

Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me. I have begun to doubt Tennyson.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

I have never, ever sought validation from the arbiters of British poetic taste.

The sign and credentials of the poet are that he announces that which no man foretold

Don't saddle me with your ideals, and spare me all your guilt. For a poet with all the answers, has never yet been built.