Poet Quotes

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

It's ridiculous and painful to use the Arabic of an Iraqi poet who lived centuries ago to describe what we in Iraq are suffering today.

I am not less poet; I am more conscious of all that I am, am not, and might become.

O woman! thou wert fashioned to beguile: So have all sages said, all poets sung.

A hundred cabinet-makers in London can work a table or a chair equally well; but no one poet can write verses with such spirit and elegance as Mr. Pope.

There are poets and there are grownups.

Most joyful let the Poet be, it is through him that all men see.

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.

For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing.

A poet can't afford to be aloof. The tools of his trade are the people he bumps up against.

Only the poet has any right to be sorry for the poor, if he has anything to spare when he has thought of the dull, commonplace rich.

Above all, we ask the poet to teach us a way of seeing.

Poems reveal secrets when they are analyzed. The poet's pleasure in finding ingenious ways to enclose her secrets should be matched by the reader's pleasure in unlocking and revealing these secrets.

See I'm a poet to some, a regular modern day Shakespeare.

I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.

If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.

Poets are always taking the weather so personally.

These days, if you happen to be a poet you have to sing your words to get your ideas out.

Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

A man may be variously accomplished, and yet be a feeble poet.

A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship.

The painter is, as to the execution of his work, a mechanic; but as to his conception and spirit and design he is hardly below even the poet.

The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk.

Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.

Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.

How does the artist function as poet-slash-witness-slash-trickster?

Art is eternally young, but the poet ages. If only he remained as young as art! If only it aged with him!

As we to the brutes, poets are to us.

A wise man can and should stand above his times, not so the poet, but he should be their apex.

When the theater gates open, a mob pours inside, and it is the poet's task to turn it into an audience.

I am not a painter. I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.

Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

The man of science is nothing if not a poet gone wrong.

But where are the snows of last year? That was the greatest concern of Villon, the Parisian poet.

I'll be a poet, and you'll be poetry.

Some great poet or philosopher once said that " he who goes to nature for comfort must go to her empty handed " , and I think he was right.

All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.

The epic poet collaborates with the spirit of his time in the composition of his work. That is, if he is successful; the time may refuse to work with him, but he may not refuse to work with his time.

I'm uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem.

Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.

Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.

Genius, that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgment is cold, and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies and animates.

With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.

Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.

The dignity of man is vindicated as much by the thinker and poet as by the statesman and soldier.

Not by wisdom do they [poets] make what they compose, but by a gift of nature and an inspiration similar to that of the diviners and the oracles.

The generous Critic fann'd the Poet's fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.

It was an epiphany when I realized you don't have to call yourself a linguist, a translator, a poet. You can call yourself an artist and you can do all these things.