Poet Quotes

One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.

To paraphrase the great poet Dante, the heavens swirl above us and our eyes are still cast to the ground.

[Thanatopsis] was written in 1817, when Bryant was 23. Had he died then, the world would have thought it had lost a great poet. But he lived on.

Do not ever read books about versification: no poet ever learnt it that way. If you are going to be a poet, it will come to you naturally and you will pick up all you need from reading poetry.

Tennyson seems to be the patron saint of the wishy washies, which is perhaps why I admire him so much, not only as a poet, but as a man.

Like a Passover Poet gliding from house to house and from trembling soul to trembling soul the wind scribbled sonnets of first time love and weeping haikus of last hours on earth.

Poets by Death are conquer'd but the wit Of poets triumphs over it.

Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word "myth" only for stories we ourselves cannot believe.

So how can a poet-an intelligent, serious poet-write mystical verse now? The poetry of Adam Zagajewski provides the beginning of an answer to this question.

As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.

I always admire writers. My father was a writer, a poet. I always admire people who can clearly state their mind.

Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages - just don't catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.

The poet lives as long as his lines are imprinted on the minds of his readers.

The poet's place, it seems to me, is with the Mr. Hydes of human nature.

A poet cannot be a Party member ... without paying the price.

A poem's life and death dependeth still Not on the poet's wits, but reader's will.

Then from the Mint walks forth the man of rhyme, Happy to catch me, just at dinner-time.

Dulness! whose good old cause I yet defend, With whom my muse began, with who shall end.

For now the poet cannot die, Nor leave his music as of old, But round him ere he scarce be cold Begins the scandal and the cry.

The passionate heart of the poet is whirled into folly and vice.

This round of green, this orb of flame, Fantastic beauty; such as lurks In some wild poet, when he works Without a conscience or an aim.

There was a poor poet named Clough, Whom his friends all united to puff, But the public, though dull, Had not such a skull As belonged to believers in Clough.

As a poet and writer in general I feel very grateful that I can just make a chapbook and that we don't have the expenses of filmmakers.

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

Drew Dellinger is a deep and courageous poet. How lucky we are!

Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.

I think it's hard to be taken seriously as a poet, period.

Crowned with leaves of the laurel. In England the Poet Laureate is an officer of the sovereign's court, acting as dancing skeleton at every royal feast and singing-mute at every royal funeral.

RIMER, n. A poet regarded with indifference or disesteem.

Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered.

Everyone wants to be open and inclusive, but nobody wants to pay for it. It's the biggest roadblock to translating living writers, especially poets.

I'm of the opinion that poetry is always political, and cannot help but be so, regardless of the poet's intent, given that refusing to deal in politics is in itself a political act.

But Fear and the Muse in turn guard the place Where the banished poet has gone And the night that comes with quickened pace Is ignorant of dawn.

And when her biographer says of an Italian woman poet, 'during some years her Muse was intermitted,' we do not wonder at the fact when he casually mentions her ten children.

Poetry colors beings, objects, landscapes and sensations with a kind of new and particular light, which is in fact that of the poet's emotions.

I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.

I am a poet, bard, scop, minnesinger, trobairitz who is driven by sound and the possibilities for vocal expression, the mouthing of text as well as intentionality or dance on the page.

I hope I'm not implying role of contemporary poet for myself, although there's a kind of resonant paradigm. It's traditionally a difficult role.

Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.

[Abbas Kiarostami] is a great artist and a poet. I sometimes think that if Samuel Beckett made films, he'd make them like Kiarostami makes them.

In order to write poetry, you must first invent a poet who will write it.

A l'intérieur de ce corps vivait l'âme d'une intellectuelle et poète dont personne n'avait le soupçon. Within this body lived the soul of an intellectual and poet, which nobody had suspected.

The difference between a poet and a philosopher is that the poet sees logically and describes basically the beauty whereas the philosopher defines the basics and shows the beauty of logics.

Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.

A poet's soul must contain the perfect shape of all things good, wise and just. His body must be spotless and without blemish, his life pure, his thoughts high, his studies intense.

If the poet would avoid pepsis in his patients, his scalpel must be as clean as the surgeon's.

The poet, like the lover, is a person unable to reconcile what he knows with what he feels. His peculiarity is that he is under a certain compulsion to do so.

Who, except the poets, reads poetry?

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.