Top 33 American Poet Quotes
#1. It's very important to me to be an American poet, a Jewish poet, a poet who came of age in the 1960s.
Edward Hirsch
#2. 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
#3. I believe that the American poet ought to be a tough son of a bitch. He sought to hold his own in this culture on his own terms and not compromise under any circumstances.
James Dickey
#4. I prefer poems that occupy an imaginative sphere. When I lived in Cincinnati, I was occasionally referred to as an "Ohio Poet;" this made me uneasy, not only because I think of myself as a generally American poet but also because I like to think I write out of the country of my own mind.
Cate Marvin
#5. Andrea Gibson is a truly American poet, or rather, she represents the America I want to live in. Her work lights a candle to lead us where we need to go.
Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz
#6. An English poet writes, I think, just for people who are interested in poetry. An American poet writes, and feels that everyone ought to appreciate this. Then he has a deep sense of grievance ...
Stephen Spender
#7. Where there is a monster, the wise American poet Ogden Nash told us, there is a miracle.
Neil Gaiman
#8. Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
W. H. Auden
#9. Jewel moved 432,000 hardcover copies of A Night Without Armor, thereby making her the best-selling American poet of the past fifty years.
Chuck Klosterman
#10. I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.
Eileen Myles
#11. As the American poet, Marianne Moore, said: There is a great deal of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.
William Strunk Jr.
#12. I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.
Kenneth Koch
#13. Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.
William, Saroyan
#14. YOUR WORDS ARE MADE OF THE AIR I BREATHE.
Amy King
#15. I've never bought a Dylan record. A singing poet? It just bores me to tears. I've got to tell you, if I had 10 Dylans in the final of 'American Idol,' we would not be getting 30 million viewers a week. I don't believe the Bob Dylans of this world would make 'American Idol 'a better show.
Simon Cowell
#16. The most important American love poet in living memory, and certainly one of the most important American poets tout court, Robert Creeley was born in 1926 and raised in eastern Massachusetts.
Susan Stewart
#17. Most of these American poets pushing and hustling their talents playing at greatness. poet (?): that word needs re- defining. when I hear that word I get a rising in the gut as if I were about to puke. let them have the stage so long as I need not be in the audience.
Charles Bukowski
#18. As Maya Angelou, American author, poet, and self-described Renaissance Woman, wrote, Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.
L.R. Knost
#19. So Lightning says to Mud,
"What would happen if I struck your blood?"
And Mud says, "Brother,
It would hurt,
And make me the mother
Of every living thing.
But, Fire Boy, you ain't lifting my grass skirt
Until you burn me a ring.
Sherman Alexie
#20. YOU SAY "POET" LIKE THAT MEANS SOMETHING.
Amy King
#21. American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
Diane Wakoski
#22. I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.
Mark Strand
#23. Poet' had always sounded like a profession to me, or a talent. But the dead American [Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry] made it sound like a faith.
Ariel Gore
#24. I do not say these things for a dollar, or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat;
Walt Whitman
#25. In American tradition a certain kind of, I would say, desperate American friendliness in which the poet tries to reach out through the page to make a connection by the side of the road with some other person.
Edward Hirsch
#26. He was a cowboy with the soul of a poet. To this day, he is the most American American I've ever met.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#27. Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.
Anne Stevenson
#28. Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry's expressiveness.
Billy Collins
#29. A great poet must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an enemy upon the leaves that strew the forest, the touch of a blind man feeling the face of a darling child.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#30. Mandelstam is the sort of poet who comes along very, very rarely. Even the two Russian poets whose work is often linked with his - Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva - though their work is more "urgent" than most American poetry, seem to me to operate at a lesser charge than Mandelstam.
Christian Wiman
#32. From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.
Diane Wakoski
#33. One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes.
Donald Hall
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