A mathematician, LIKE a painter or POET, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more PERMANENT than theirs, it is because they are made with IDEAS.

I am a POET, and I SPEAK poetically.

One of my very FAVOURITE poets was a MASSACHUSETTS POET named Robert Lowell.

There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a POET, I shall try to WRITE a SONNET. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.

A NOVELIST can GET by on STORY, but the poet has nothing but the words.

I went to SCHOOL in CALIFORNIA, at Stanford when I was SEVENTEEN, and I lived in San Francisco until I was twenty-three, and then I lived in Hungary for, like, a summer, and then I went to Iowa for three years. At Iowa, I actually did the FICTION program, not poetry. I was a fiction writer for a long TIME before I was 'out' as a poet.

I sing in LANGUAGES that I SPEAK. So when I'm SINGING a Schubert song, I know precisely what every WORD means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or FRENCH Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever.

I once said a poet has the right to sing as loudly and vocally as he wants to. Most POETS should FACE a rock n' roll AUDIENCE for one night to keep them HONEST.

With a great POET the sense of BEAUTY overcomes every other consideration, or RATHER obliterates all consideration.

Because we are all of an oral TRADITION in our beginning HISTORIES, the voice of the POET in this particular SOCIETY will be HEARD.

Let's detox our cluttered academic BRAIN. That's what the poet does. People call it daydreaming, detoxing our MINDS and TAKING care of that clutter. It's being able to let in call letters from the POETRY UNIVERSE.

I want young children to savor and ENJOY Tagore LIKE I did since I was a child. He was too great a POET of India to be kept limited to Bengal. EVERYBODY should read and CELEBRATE him.

The true POET for me is a PRIEST. As soon as he dons the cassock, he MUST leave his FAMILY.

In the hands of a GREAT POET, WORDS have ways of affecting US in ways we don't understand.

In AFRICAN-AMERICAN CULTURE, there's often a family historian, someone who does the genealogy or keeps the family Bible. I became AWARE that might be one ROLE the poet has.