
“Not every poet is a great reader of his own work.”
Interview with Ernest Hibert (2006)
How to Read a Poem And Fall in Love with Poetry (1998)
“Not every poet is a great reader of his own work.”
Interview with Ernest Hibert (2006)
“When you meet a swordsman, draw your sword: Do not recite poetry to one who is not a poet.”
Source: The 48 Laws of Power
"What is a Poem?" from Anarchism Is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)
“It is outrageous that a strictly abstemious reader should sit in judgement on a poet a little drunk.”
Iniurium est de poeta male sobrio lectorem abstemium iudicare.
Griphus Ternarii Numeri, "Ausonio Symmacho"; translation from Helen Waddell The Wandering Scholars ([1927] 1954) p. 37.
“The poet's dilemma.. to create order in the midst of disorder”
Modern American Poetry 1950
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time
“The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of "a moment of their other lives"”
a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.
"The Poet's Vision" (1959)
“Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.”
"In Warsaw" (1945), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz, Robert Hass and Madeline Levine
Rescue (1945)
Context: How can I live in this country
Where the foot knocks against
The unburied bones of kin?
I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot
Write anything; five hands
Seize my pen and order me to write
The story of their lives and deaths.
Was I born to become
a ritual mourner?
I want to sing of festivities,
The greenwood into which Shakespeare
Often took me. Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.
Letter to William Sotheby (13 July 1802)
Letters
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 172