A Quote by Octavio Paz

Poet: gardener of epitaphs. — © Octavio Paz
Poet: gardener of epitaphs.

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I never meant to be a full-time poet: I started out as a gardener, an ideal job for a poet because your head is left free.
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.
But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with color nicely flung.
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
The gardener does not make a plant grow. The job of a gardener is to create optimal conditions for growth
Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.
Fragrance, whether strong or delicate, is a highly subjective matter, and one gardener's perfume is another gardener's stink.
I think the true gardener is a lover of his flowers, not a critic of them. I think the true gardener is the reverent servant of Nature, not her truculent, wife-beating master. I think the true gardener, the older he grows, should more and more develop a humble, grateful and uncertain spirit.
One becomes a gardener by becoming a gardener.
One of the appeals of William Carlos Williams to me is that he was many different kinds of poet. He tried out many different forms in his own way of, more or less, formlessness. He was also a poet who could be - he was a love poet, he was a poet of the natural order and he was also a political poet.
My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when - and he won't necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.
The very best relationship has a gardener and a flower. The gardener nurtures and the flower blooms.
There is nothing like the first hot days of spring when the gardener stops wondering if it's too soon to plant the dahlias and starts wondering if it's too late. Even the most beautiful weather will not allay the gardener's notion (well-founded actually) that he is somehow too late, too soon, or that he has too much stuff going on or not enough. For the garden is the stage on which the gardener exults and agonizes out every crest and chasm of the heart.
Then there are those who plant. they endure storms and all the many vicissitudes of the seasons, and they rarely rest. But, unlike a building, a garden never stops growing. And while it requires the gardener's constant attention, it also allows life for the gardener to be a great adventure.
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.
The farmer and the gardener are both busy, the gardener perhaps the more excitable of the two, for he is more of the amateur, concerned with the creation of beauty rather than with the providing of food. Gardening is a luxury occupation; an ornament, not a necessity, of life.
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