The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical - their data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
There are two types of poets: People who write poetically about their lives, and poets that live poetically and write about it.
With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.
Poets are like the decathletes of literature.
Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.
I don't try to call myself a poet. But I know that my stuff is pretty literal, in that the themes are pretty simple and on the surface.
In a funny way, poems are suited to modern life. They're short, they're intense. Nobody has time to read a 700-page book. People read magazines, and a poem takes less time than an article.
If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.
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