A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

诗人是这样的人，他一生能在雷雨中脱颖而出，被雷击五六次。

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

诗人是这样的人，他架起通向星星的梯子——一边爬梯子一边拉提琴。

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

诗人是夜莺，他坐在黑暗中，用甜美的歌声为自己的孤独歌唱。

A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight.

诗人是一个动词，它在黎明或午夜的花园里绽放光明。

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

诗人首先是一个热爱语言的人。

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

诗人看待世界的方式就像男人看待女人一样。

A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.

诗人必须是一位心理学家，但必须是一位秘密的心理学家:他应该知道并感受现象的根源，但只呈现现象本身盛开的花朵，或随着现象的消逝而消失。

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

诗人从不记笔记。在恋爱中你从不做笔记。

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

诗人不应该扒窃自然的衣袋。让他借钱吧，借了就借，借了就借，借了就借，借了就还。准确地审视自然，但要从回忆中写作，更要相信想象力，而不是记忆。

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.

一个诗人如果在公共场合读他的诗，他可能还有其他令人讨厌的习惯。

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

诗人的自传就是他的诗。其他的都只是一个脚注。

A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.

诗人的使命是让文字比平常发挥更大的作用，使它们在不止一个层面上发挥作用。

A poet’s work... To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.

一个诗人的作品……指名道姓，指名道姓，指名道姓，站得住脚，挑起争论，塑造世界，阻止它沉睡。

A polite enemy is just as difficult to discredit, as a rude friend is to protect.

有礼貌的敌人难以败坏名声，粗鲁的朋友难以保护。

A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.

政治动物可以被定义为一个机构，它将继续传播一份请愿书，即使它的心脏被切掉了。