Poets are the most difficult creatures to work with.

When I think of poetry, I feel its fierce human suffering and its joy.

A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.

The title of poet's a noble thing, worth living and dying for, Though all the devils on earth and in Hell spit at me their disdain. It is stern work, it is perilous work, to thrust your hand in the sun And pull out a spark of immortal flame to warm the hearts of men: But Prometheus, torn by the claws and beaks whose task is never done, Would be tortured another eternity to go stealing fire again.

To be a poet is to be taller, to be bigger
Than men! It is to bite as if you’re kissing!
It is to give alms, although you are a beggar like
King of the Realm where only pain is missing!</p>It is to have a thousand desires for splendor
And do not even know what we want!
It is to have inside yourself a flaming star,
It is to have the condor’s mighty claw and wing! It is to be hungry, to be thirsty of Infinity!
By helmet, golden and satin mornings...
It is to condense the world into one lonely cry! And it is loving you, thus, hopelessly...
And it is you being soul, and blood, and life in me
And tell it singing to everyone!

There is a pleasure in poetic pains Which only poets know.

You want poetry, first you have to muck in with humanity, you have to fight with paper and pencil for weeks and weeks until your heart bleeds: verses aren't channelled into your head by angels or muses or sprites of nature.

"A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret suffrings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. People corwd around the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul.

Why should a poet pray thus? poets scorn The boundaried love of country, being free Of winds, and alien lands, and distances, Vagabonds of the compass, wayfarers, Pilgrims of thought, the tongues of Pentecost Their privilege, and in the peddler's pack The curious treasures of their stock-in-trade, Bossy and singular, the heritage Of poetry and science, polished bright, Thin with the rubbing of too many hands; Myth, glamour, hazard, fables dim as age, Faith, doubt, perplexity, grief, hope, despair, Wings, and great waters, and Promethean fire, Man's hand to clasp, and Helen's mouth to kiss. Why then in little meadows hedge about A poet's pasture? shed a poet's cloak For fustian? cede a birthright, thus to map So small a corner of so great a world?

What is more dangerous than to become a poet? which is, as some say, an incurable and infectious disease.

The art and the reality is very difficult sometimes to reconcile, but also I don’t think that the poet have to be in an ivory tower just thinking beautiful thoughts, you know, when there are so much horrible in — ‘mid you, you know, outside you. And then I think you have to go and look at that and feel it and suffer with the others and make that suffering useful.

The bad poet is likely to have suffered and felt joy as deeply as the poet reckoned first class, but he has not somehow been given the power of translating experience into images and emblems, or of melting words in the furnace of his mind and making them flow into the channels prepared to take them.

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.

Before we are poets we are human beings, and we do have compromises as human beings. You get horrified at the injustices, at the violence, at all of the terrible things happening in all of the world. And that is reflected in your poetry, because it has touched you very deeply. But you are not putting your poetry in the service of politics.