I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is prose = words in their best order - poetry = the best words in the best order.

Poetry is the work of poets not of peoples or communities artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry but a kind of instinct or inspiration such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

On Memorial Day I don't want to only remember the combatants. There were also those who came out of the trenches as writers and poets who started preaching peace men and women who have made this world a kinder place to live.

Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively from a distance and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world and at myself from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality.

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world have been achieved by poor men poor scholars poor professional men poor artisans and artists poor philosophers poets and men of genius.

When men and woman die as poets sung his heart's the last part moves her last the tongue.

Nobody has ever measured not even poets how much the heart can hold.

Poets are the sense philosophers the intelligence of humanity.

It is quite true as some poets said that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor creating him a reasonable being yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.

Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.

To have great poets there must be great audiences.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

And poets in my view and I think the view of most people do speak God's language - it's better it's finer it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

In its famous paradox the equation of money and excrement psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.

There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman now and the man was gone.

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial but an indispensable experience which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?