A Quote by Philip Larkin
I am not sure, once a poet has found out what has been written already, and how it was written - once, in short, he has learnt his trade - that he should bother with literature at all. Poetry is not like surgery, a technique that can be copied. Every operation the poet performs is unique, and need never be done again.
Related Quotes
It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.
Crushed to earth and rising again is an author's gymnastic. Once he fails to struggle to his feet and grab his pen, he will contemplate a fact he should never permit himself to face: that in all probability books have been written, are being written, will be written, better than anything he has done, is doing, or will do.
Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.
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.
I'm out there to clean the plate. Once they've read what I've written on a subject, I want them to think, 'That's it!' I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they've written a story, nobody will ever try it again.
One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a well-made verbal object that does honor to the language in which it is written. Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective. What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.
In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.
I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.
I am NOT an anarchist. Never have been, never will be. Just because Crimethinc put out two of my poetry books, I am labeled everywhere as an anarchist poet. I am a poet, yes. Not an anarchist. I have no formulated political philosophy other than a general feeling of disgust for the majority of the human race.
I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.
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.
I once saw a picture in the paper of John Hegley with 'poet' written on his knuckles, and I thought that was pretty cool, so I was quite up front about it.
Once a poet always a poet, and even though I haven't written poems for a long time, I can nonetheless say that everything I've ever learned about writing lyrical fiction has been informed by three decades of writing in lines and stanzas. For me the real drama of fiction is almost always the drama of the language.
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