Poet Quotes

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.

Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.

Don't ask a poet to explain himself. He cannot.

A poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a director an army.

The true poet is a friendly man. He takes to his arms even cold and inanimate things, and rejoices in his heart.

Whatever my passions demand of me, I become for the time being - musician, poet, director, author, lecturer or anything else.

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry

Many have genius, but, wanting art, are forever dumb. The two must go together to form the great poet, painter, or sculptor.

I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet.

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.

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

The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a faculty the less? or a sense the more?

A small poet repeats himself like a clock.

For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.

The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.

The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own.

Our job is to become more and more of what we are. The growth of a poet seems to be related to his or her becoming less and less embarrassed about more and more.

Being an artist is nothing, or at least, not enough; what you want is to be a poet.

Wine it is the milk of Venus, And the poet's horse accounted: Ply it and you all are mounted.

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.

Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.

This is truth the poet sings . . .

The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.

We ask the poet: 'What subject have you chosen?' instead of: 'What subject has chosen you?

Every poet hopes that after-times Shall set some value on his votive lay.

Women are the simple, and poets the superior, artisans of language... the intervention of grammarians is almost always bad.

Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish.

Oh, what company good poets are!

I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word.

For next to being a great poet is the power of understanding one.