“a poet is after all, to see”

“In the beginning the Poets and Philosophers taught the world to see. Then after that any form of education was no longer free.”

“Poets and intellectuals...are the ones the tyrants go after first.”

“I wanted him to be a poet. I wanted him to adventure out into the world and learn its ways, not losing himself in the jumble of life but seeing it in the poet's eye, and withdrawing after in the library room where he could write his poems of revelation. He would tell what he had seen. He never wrote a word in his life. But he did see.”

“The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.”

“...after I published a paper showing that suicidal poets used pronouns differently from non-suicidal poets, a slightly inebriated poet threatened me with a butter knife at a party in my own home.”