A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
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.
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
Poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument - language and breath.
The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.
Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.
Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.
Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable.
What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.