Top 100 A Poet Quotes
#1. Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief.
Bono
#2. I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.
Norman Lock
#3. The wonderful 17th Century poet, Robert Herrick, wrote a poem entitled, 'To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses.' Easy to say, Robert Herrick; not always easy to do. But it's a good slogan, I think.
Robert Pinsky
#4. A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything's going to be all right. you've made it past Dead Man's Curve and you're out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.
Haruki Murakami
#5. 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.
Marvin Bell
#6. A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.
Douglas Dunn
#7. Screamin' 'Carpe Diem!' until I'm a Dead Poet.
Jay-Z
#8. Ultimately you're trying to reach across and find some other person, some other human warmth. But it is, especially in written poetry, it is inscribed in a text and the text can't do that work by itself and you as a poet can only do your best.
Edward Hirsch
#9. A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world.
Johann Gottfried Herder
#10. When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.
Rhys Ifans
#11. The historian must be a poet; not to find, but to find again; not to breathe life into beings, into imaginary deeds, but in order to re-animate and revive that which has been; to represent what time and space have placed at a distance from us.
Philibert Joseph Roux
#12. For a young and presumptuous poet a disposition to write satires is one of the most dangerous he can encourage. It tempts him to personalities, which are not always forgiven after he has repented and become ashamed of them.
Robert Southey
#13. Forced relations between two things that superficially appear foreign create a new, instantaneous state. Authentic poetry asks nothing more. A kinship completely nonexistent moments ago was created by the poet's authority, just as it might have been created in life by the authority of chance.
Odysseus Elytis
#14. He wanted to be a poet,' someone else put in while Maggie hugged Tim and patted his back. 'Said he'd only lacked the words to be one.
Nora Roberts
#15. Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.
Michael N. Castle
#16. The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.
William Shakespeare
#17. A poet is a musician who can't sing. Words have to find a man's mind before they can touch his heart, and some men's minds are woeful small targets.
Patrick Rothfuss
#18. To be a true poet is to become God.
I tried to explain this to my friends on Heaven's Gate. 'Piss, shit,' I said. 'Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn. Cunt. Pee-pee cunt. Goddamn!'
They shook their heads and smiled, and walked away. Great poets are rarely understood in their own day.
Dan Simmons
#19. If I am not mistaken, it was a British poet who said that 'no one is properly dressed unless he wears a smile.'
Sukarno
#20. A poet! I should have known you for a poet by how your body moved.
Patrick Rothfuss
#21. The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Robert Graves
#22. I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.
Nell Freudenberger
#23. Love is a great poet, its resources are inexhaustible, but if the end it has in view is not obtained, it feels weary and remains silent.
Giacomo Casanova
#24. A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.
Cecil Day-Lewis
#25. I've made a lot of choices, some good, some not so good; how sad for those who merely hitchhike along, never daring to choose at all.
C.J. Heck
#26. Is encouragement what the poet needs? Open question. Maybe he needs discouragement. In fact, quite a few of them need more discouragement, the most discouragement possible.
Robert Fitzgerald
#27. When you put a poem on a Kindle, the lines are broken in order to fit on the screen. And so instead of being the poet's decision, it becomes the device's decision.
Billy Collins
#28. Surely there is a knowing behind it all. There is a teacher, an expresser, a creator, an artist perhaps, a poet certainly that has designed and presented all of the clues that we need to navigate life with some degree of grace, and perhaps with a greater degree of happiness than we now have.
Jeffrey R. Anderson
#29. I have written a raucous valentine to a poet's dream and agony.
Ben Hecht
#30. I'm a poet who practices Zen. And it's not, I'm somebody who practices Zen who writes poetry. There's no separation for me.
Sam Hamill
#31. To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.
Lucille Clifton
#32. It's not that he doesn't appreciate beauty, he just appreciates it in his own way. I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany.
Terry Pratchett
#33. Tis a question whether adversity or prosperity makes the most poets.
George Farquhar
#34. (1)BEING A POET
is like opening a car door
& exposing yourself.
(2)BEING A GOOD POET
is like opening the door
& exposing the passenger
as well.
Chocolate Waters
#35. Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas.
Cynthia Ozick
#36. The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's life ...
A.S. Byatt
#37. You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.
Bob Dylan
#38. Being a poet is not a job or a profession but a way of life.
Kathleen Raine
#39. An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad truth,
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,
And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#40. The poet, as a rule, is a half-man - a sissy, not a real person, and he is in no shape to lead real men in matters of blood, or courage.
Charles Bukowski
#41. Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.
Robert E. Howard
#42. I am a member of the Muskogee people. I'm a poet, a musician, a dreamer of sorts, a questioner. Like everyone else, I'm looking for answers of some sort or the other.
Joy Harjo
#43. That is the best instruction you could ever give a poet: whether you're examining a bad line in a poem or a bad motive for action, keep well your repining - meaning, don't ignore the honest muttering in your head.
Alice Oswald
#44. It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road.
Donald Hall
#45. I guess you're right - I am a priest - I offer sacrifices - so take this line, I want you to have something of mine ...
John Geddes
#46. Moscow, Rome, London, Paris stay in place. Leningrad and New York float, spreading all their sails, cutting space with their prows, and can disappear, if not in reality, then in the imagination of the poet creating a myth, a mythical tradition on the grounds of his secret experience.
Nina Berberova
#48. Every poem can be considered in two ways
as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
C.S. Lewis
#49. You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.
Theophile Gautier
#50. I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a children's author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first woman president.
Rachel Corrie
#51. I have neither the ability of a poet or the flourish of a dramatist. But I must admit I was floored
Tushar Raheja
#52. Heard ten thousand whispering and nobody listening. Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughing. Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter.
Bob Dylan
#53. A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.
Anna Brownell Jameson
#54. As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree'
probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.
Woody Allen
#55. I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.
Anne Stevenson
#57. Where even ravi (the sun) cannot reach, there will go a kavi (poet). - Vimalananda
Robert E. Svoboda
#58. If there ever was a poet for the working class Billy Joe Shaver and Merle Haggard would be my nomination.
David Allan Coe
#59. Women are very different to men, and that hasn't been respected. So when people say there's never been a good woman painter or poet or engineer or whatever, they don't understand that our skills are many simultaneously and men's skills are single.
Joanna Lumley
#60. Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.
Criss Jami
#61. A poet must be a composer of plots rather than of verses,
Aristotle.
#62. I may as well tell you, here and now, that if you are going about the place thinking things pretty, you will never make a modern poet. Be poignant, man, be poignant!
P.G. Wodehouse
#64. Examine this statement: 'A woman cannot be a poet.' Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?
Jeanette Winterson
#65. I am a writer because I write, an author because I create, a poet because the words are in my soul.
Wesley D. Gray
#66. Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.
Eileen Myles
#67. He [the poet] brings out the inner part of things and presents them to men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets themselves.
Hilaire Belloc
#68. What a lover's heart knows let no man's brain dispute.
Aberjhani
#69. I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.
Margaret Atwood
#70. I think some period drama can be quite alienating, but 'Downton' isn't. This is going to sound quite, um, pretentious, but someone said that it's like a soap written by a poet.
Michelle Dockery
#71. If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches
Rainer Maria Rilke
#72. People can't see that if I had not been a poet, I could never have had such success as a traveler.
Bayard Taylor
#73. In poetry, and in my study in graduate school, I was drawn to a particular poet, Theodore Roethke. I did a dissertation on "The Evolution of Matter and Spirit in the Poetry of Theodore Roethke" for my Ph.D.
Frederick Lenz
#74. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.
Charles Olson
#75. A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he candivide.
Franz Grillparzer
#76. Life. This morning the sun made me adore it. It had, behind the dripping pine trees, the oriental brightness, orange and crimson, of a living being, a rose and an apple, in the physical and ideal fusion of a true and daily paradise.
Juan Ramon Jimenez
#77. I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter - or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then.
Jonathan Galassi
#78. I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.
William Butler Yeats
#79. These days, if you happen to be a poet you have to sing your words to get your ideas out.
Sara Genn
#80. Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.
Honore De Balzac
#81. Eggs I must instantly have!" she announced. "And Lope de Vega I will not have, though in general a fine poet, but not in the kitchen!
Georgette Heyer
#82. A man was leaning idly against an elm ... The man, who towered over the poet even at his slanting angle, too old for a student and too worn for a faculty member, stared at him with the familiar, insatiable gleam of the literary admirer.
Matthew Pearl
#83. Both the poet and scholar are trying to learn something. The poem for me is a pursuit. Some of the answers are within. Some of the answers are without.
Gregory Pardlo
#84. Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. - It is not fair. - He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. - I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it - but fear I must.
Jane Austen
#85. I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties.
Fernando Pessoa
#87. I mean the most important thing you can have as an actor, writer, director, or whatever you are, poet or whatever it is, is life experience. Life experience doesn't mean you have to live 50 years to have it. I mean you know a lot of people have huge life experience by the time they're in college.
Billy Bob Thornton
#88. I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.
Carl Rakosi
#89. Rainer Maria Rilke was admittedly not a Dockers tagger, but a sort of European equivalent: a German poet - in many respects, a charlatan masquerading as a genius who turned out to be a genius.
Richard Flanagan
#90. A poet is a silent singer; he sings the deep songs of the soul silently.
Debasish Mridha
#91. It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.
Randall Jarrell
#92. I think of New York City lost in stars
forgotten as a blue haired pet of childhood love
Tonight the night is full;
Gregory Corso
#93. At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.
Seth Godin
#94. Out of the ruined lodge and forgotten mansion, bowers that are trodden under foot, and pleasure-houses that are dust, the poet calls up a palingenesis.
Thomas De Quincey
#97. When a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was ... this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.
Orhan Pamuk
#98. And in a way, that's been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet - sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a while. This happens to everybody.
Norman MacCaig
#99. The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him.
Henry David Thoreau
#100. Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor ... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.
R.S. Thomas
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