Poet Quotes

A poet is the translator of the silent language of nature to the world.

All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart.

Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.

The poet, distracted by politics, asks of poetry that it make itself useful like metal or flour, that it get ready to stain its face with coal dust and fight body to body.

Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness.

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

Poets tell many lies.

The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.

If he had had no education, maybe Basho could have been a much greater poet.

The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.

The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.

To a poet nothing can be useless.

Was ever poet so trusted before?

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.

I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.

The end of spring- the poet is brooding about editors.

Academia is a graveyard of poets.

Being a poet is not a job or a profession but a way of life.

I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I wanted to be a poem.

The deviant that does not observe the trivial uses of the language is a poet, a deviant who violates the banal customs of society is a criminal.

He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet.

No place is a place until it has found its poet.

A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer.

Honor a good woman because she is virtuous and honorable.

And they were all, when their souls grew warm, poets.

The poet is a master of language, the schizophrenic is a slave to it.

What was said by the Latin poet of labor--that it conquers all things--is much more true when applied to impudence.

Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet.

Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.

I think that all my books are political, I think that I have a political body of work. I am essentially a political woman, but above all I am a poet. I am a poetess.

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of a man.

I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.

The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's.

Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill.

I have decided, it is fruitless. For I am no longer sure of anything concerning my existance. A philosopher is a dead poet and a dying theologian.

I think I've always felt very isolated, and I'm sure lots of poets do.

The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of "a moment of their other lives" - a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.

The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said "A civilization is judged only in its decline." That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players.

I think most poets are natural witnesses and were curious about everything.

It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind.

- How is he in bed? Gladiator or poet? - Hmmm... A poetic gladiator.

Subtract from many modern poets all that may be found in Shakespeare, and trash will remain.

PRISON, n. A place of punishments and rewards. The poet assures us that - stone walls do not a prison make.

Just because a poet said something didn’t mean it was true, only that it sounded good.

[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.

A boy in love is not mainly a calf but a poet.

I'm a poet. I'm just a renaissance man in my heart. I can build shelves and I can write poetry.

I thought I was going to be a poet when I was in college, but then I found out I was poor so I decided to do something I'd get paid for.

There is only one vice, which may be found in life with as strong features, and as high a colouring as needs be employed by any satyrist or comic poet; and that is AVARICE.