Poet Quotes

Poets, the first instructors of mankind, Brought all things to the proper native use.

Neither men, nor gods, nor booksellers' shelves permit ordinary poets to exist. [Lat., Mediocribus esse poetis Non homines, non di, non concessere columnae.]

Poets are never allowed to be mediocre by the gods, by men or by publishers.

The fellow is either a madman or a poet.

If you rank me with the lyric poets, my exalted head shall strike the stars. [Lat., Quod si me lyricis vatibus inseris, Sublimi feriam sidera vertice.]

The man is either crazy or he is a poet.

The poet must put on the passion he wants to represent.

If Rumi is the most-read poet in America today, Coleman Barks is in good part responsible. His ear for the truly divine madness in Rumi’s poetry is really remarkable.

A poet may be a good companion, but, so far as I know, he is ever the worst of fathers.

Drawing is the poet's written line, set down to see if there be a story worth telling, a truth worth revealing.

A poet is a painter of the soul.

The poet and the painter are only truly great by the mutual influences of their studies, and the jealousy of glory has only produced an idle contest.

The poet must be alike polished by an intercourse with the world as with the studies of taste; one to whom labour is negligence, refinement a science, and art a nature.

I'd better be a poet Or lay down dead.

The poet is stepping out of the airplane.

Do you remember any great poet that ever illustrated the higher fields of humanity that did not dignify the use of wine from Homer on down?

I want to reiterate that my understanding of the poem is not the poem's core, true meaning. Once a poem goes out into the world, the poet is just one more reader.

Most poets in their youth begin in adolescent sadness. I find it more rewarding to end in gladness.

Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be.

A poet trains himself to stand out in a storm and be struck by lightning. If he is lucky enough to be struck six times, he becomes immortal. Randall Jarrell said it and he's right.

There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.

Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.

He was a poet; and they are never exactly grown-up.

A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity

Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths.

[Bob Dylan] is a preacher but also a sinner; a poet but also a pitchman; authentic all-American but also invented persona.

The poet Paul Éluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car.

The poet will not be satisfied with recording, the poet will have to transform.

…only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.

For me personally, I love art and artists of all mediums and we've seen madness is more often than not present in the greatest painters, poets, writers, and songwriters in history.

But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.

For a poet, style is the only morality.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

Being engaged with life. One has to develop a poet's eye for perfect moments, moments that most people pass by.

I love John Ashbery. He's the - really the poet laureate of English language poetry, whether he's given that or not, he is to me.

Whether the poet is living or dead, they're part of our imaginative community.

Shakespeare is dangerous to young poets; they cannot but reproduce him, while they fancy that they produce themselves.

If you want to understand poetry, You have to go to its origin, If you want to understand the poet, You have to go to the Poet's home.

The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.

The question "From where does the poet get it?" addresses only the what, nobody learns anything about the how when asking that question.

At bottom, no real object is unpoetical, if the poet knows how to use it properly.

If a poet would work politically, he must give himself up to a party; and so soon as he does that, he is lost as a poet.

Whoever would understand the poet Must go into the poet's country. [Ger., Wer den Dichter will verstehen Muss in Dichters Lande gehen.]

Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up to date in their chemical knowledge.

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.

I think poets tell better history than historians. Historians lie all the time but the poets can get to truth of it.

In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter.

Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of.

When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.

The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely.