Poet Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

There are poets and there are grownups.

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.

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

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

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 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.

Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits; they do not come to coo.

The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.

Call it not vain: they do not err Who say that when the poet dies Mute Nature mourns her worshipper, And celebrates his obsequies.

There is no Sixth Commandment in art. The poet is entitled to lay his hands on whatever material he finds necessary for his work.

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

But Racine's extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great psychologist.

Never was flattery lost on a poet's ear; a simple race, they waste their toil for the vain tribute of a smile.

What is a modern poet's fate? / To write his thoughts upon a slate; / The critic spits on what is done, / Gives it a wipe - and all is gone.

All I do and say and think 'as a poet' is much truer and more intimate than anything I say face to face.

Words become luminous when the poet's finger has passed over them its phosphorescence.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

I'm drawn to this range, that's for sure, but I suppose the thing that most appeals to me about Mandelstam is the sense you get from every poem that everything - the poet's very soul - is at stake.

Frost isn’t exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.

All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual.

We must all teach ourselves to be fine, to be poets.

I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.

A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.

The true poet dreams being awake.

I am a poet who composes what life proses, and who proses what life composes.

Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life?

Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else.

When the old poets made some virtue their theme, they were not teaching but adoring.

The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.

Advice to Young Poets Never pretend to be a unicorn by sticking a plunger on your head.

The engineers of the future will be poets.

The nature of rumor is well known to all. It was your own poet who said: 'Rumor, an evil surpassing all evils in speed.'

Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but, all unwept and unknown, are lost in the distant night, since they are without a divine poet (to chronicle their deeds).

Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were "I go to seek a Great Perhaps." That's why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.

I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

It is bad taste for a poet to be coarse and hairy.

We are proud to have with us the poet lariat of Chicago.

As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail.

Take time for good books; time to absorb the thoughts of poets and philosophers, seers and prophets.

Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

A good poet's made as well as born.

It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back.

I had the title poet, and maybe I was one for a while. Also, the title singer was kindly accorded me, even though I could barely carry a tune.