Poet Quotes

I'm not a poet. I wish I was a poet but I'm not. I'm a playwright. And so I have a different set of antecedents.

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered.

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

Even a poet cannot get everything right.

A poet's first contract is with truth.

The category "Women Poets" is bizarre and irrelevant. It's a subcategory of Poets, but there is not a "Men Poets" category.

The child and the poet know that Reality is what does not need to be realistic.

A poet is a world enclosed in a man.

My life all-around is really different than a lot of other poets. Not poets that are parents, too, but just that I can hardly find anyone who works in the industries that I've worked in.

I do think that given my background as a poet, and also I work in a different field, you're sort of neither here nor there.

I definitely have favorite books by favorite poets, but poets' books also vary. I could like some books, but not like another book.

I think being a poet, period, is isolating.

The poet is always our contemporary.

The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.

The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.

By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.

Encased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known; They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone.

You can't be a poet certainly of my generation and not have deep in your animal brain the comment of William Carlos Williams, no ideas except in things.

It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.

The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.

A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.

Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.

Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.

The vain poet is of the opinion that nothing of his can be too much: he sends to you basketful after basketful of juiceless fruit, covered with scentless flowers.

Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's.

What an ornament and safeguard is humor! Far better than wit for a poet and writer. It is a genius itself, and so defends from the insanities.

For five hundred years after Walther's death - until Goethe - no German lyric poet was his equal.

The most available example of how poetry works for a poet is yourself, and yet you'll probably be the last one to know exactly how you're serving the art and how the art is serving you.

I'd like to imagine that "dreamoir" becomes a subgenre of nonfiction, maybe ultimately because I'd love to read many more dreamoirs by other writers - poets and memoirists especially.

I'm not a journalist; I'm a poet. I had a discourse, an encounter with these people but I never had a list of questions.

Thomas Jefferson was a real poet. He was slick with that 'pursuit' of happiness because the 'pursuit' puts it back on you.

Some moralist or mythological poet Compares the solitary soul to a swan; I am satisfied with that, Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it, Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.

All great poets have been men of great knowledge.

How much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable) who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of a historian.

Avarice is the miser's dream, as fame is the poet's.

Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.

Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.

The Poet in his ArtMust intimate the whole, and say the smallest part.

A great poet ought to a certain degree to rectify men's feelings... to render their feelings more sane, pure and permanent, in short, more consonant to Nature.

The Poet, gentle creature as he is, Hath, like the Lover, his unruly times; His fits when he is neither sick nor well, Though no distress be near him but his own Unmanageable thoughts.

The poet must work with brush and paper,but this is not what makes the poem. A man does not go in search of a poem - the poem comes in search of him.

I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.

Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.

Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.

what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about

The poet's first job of work is to put bread on the table.

I really like accompanying. I like working with vocalists, I've worked with a lot of poets.

Wake! For the Sun, who scatter'd into flightThe Stars before him from the Field of Night, Drives Night along with them from Heav'n, and strikesThe Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light