All the poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets must be truthful.
The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.
As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.
The role of the poet is almost nothing...drearily nothing. And when he steps outside of his boots and tries to get tough as our dear Ezra [Pound] did, he will get his pink little ass slapped.
All a poet can do today is warn.
The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet's duty to hold the line.
All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.
My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.
If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
The business of a poet is to examine not the individual but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances.
God has ordered poets to be the fiery pillars and so to lead the wandering people into Canaan’s promised land.
It is enough for a poet to be the guilty conscience of his age.
It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.
The duty of a lyrical poet is not to express or explain, it is to intensify life.
The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.
The poet, distracted by politics, asks of poetry that it make itself useful like metal or flour, that it get ready to stain its face with coal dust and fight body to body.
I hope I'm not implying role of contemporary poet for myself, although there's a kind of resonant paradigm. It's traditionally a difficult role.
