“Being alive is so extraordinary I don’t know why people limit it to riches, pride, security—all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can’t see anything from a car. It’s moving too fast. People take vacations. That’s their reward—the vacation. Why not the life?”

Jack Gilbert

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“For the first time in my life I see that I have grown an inch and I believe that I may in ten years be a poet. It is wonderful.”

May Sarton

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“Please—take care of your health! Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs—no regular hours—so many temptations!”

Elizabeth Bishop

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“…if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.”

Ray Bradbury

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“By age thirty, I’m not writing squat, which I blame on my ramped-up consulting schedule, knowing full well my favorite poet was a full-time insurance exec.”

Mary Karr

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“How can I put it? It’s like winning the Pulitzer. If you take it too seriously, you’re an idiot. But if you look at the names of the other poets who have won it, most of them are damn good. Not all of them—I’m not going to name names—but most. My editor was thrilled, and my wife jumped for joy. She hasn’t done that in a while.”

Philip Levine

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“I’ve been sick, joking aside. The trouble seems to be that I wasn’t taken up carefully enough in Franconia nor replanted soon enough in South Shaftsbury. It has been a bad job of transplanting. I lost a lot of roots (the tap root entirely) and the roots I have left are pretty well impaired by too long exposure to the air out of the ground. You’re a poet yourself and finely constituted; so you don’t have to be told how it is with poets. The time of year too has been against me, let them say what they will in rural journalism. Even in the case of evergrins [sic] I find that the fall is not a favorable time for transplanting. And I’m not an evergrin. It has gone hard with me.”

Robert Frost

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“Being a poet, divining beauty, is like divining nature—a gift. It does not matter if one does not create. It is enough to have the poetic vision. To see the beauty hidden. As I did tonight, hearing someone whistle in the distance as I stood by an open window. I felt all kinds of moods of streets at night, of walking with loved women, of the dark blue and whiteness, and the strange, magical desertion of streets at night. I felt it all exactly in a moment, such a rush of impressions that they can hardly be seized. Algernon Blackwood: ‘To feel like a poet is not to be a poet.’ True, yet, poetry making is not necessarily the printing of words. It is a philosophical outlook, an epicureanism, a hedonism.”

John Fowles

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“It is lonely without the birds to-day, for it rains badly, and the little poets have no umbrellas.”

Emily Dickinson

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“I wrote somewhere that the poet at fifteen wants to be as great as Dante; by twenty-five he wants to be in The New Yorker.”

Donald Hall

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“Considering her inordinate reclusiveness, who then walked Emily Dickinson’s huge dog?”

David Markson

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