"Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation."

Poet, Poets

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"Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation."

Exlpore more Poet quotes

"I don't know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets - the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from."

Robert Adamson, Scottish Philosopher

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"The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember."

David Antin, American Poet

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"Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors."

James Broughton, American Director

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"Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together."

Roger McGough, British Poet

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"I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen."

Carl Sandburg, American Poet

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"I can't look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do."

Isaac Rosenberg, English Poet

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"The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible."

T. S. Eliot, American Poet

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"Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence."

Brian Harris, American Lawyer

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"I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself."

Diane Wakoski, American Poet

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"The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them."

Salvatore Quasimodo, Italian Author

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Explore more quotes by Kenneth Koch

"I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other."

People

"It seems everything is so full of possibilities one can hardly take it all in."

Humor

"Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur."

Being

"I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them."

People

"I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not."

Poetry

"I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world."

Friendship

"As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is."

Time

"When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!"

Writing

"It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work."

Work

"I'm a writer who likes to be influenced."

Influence