Top 98 Good Poet Quotes
#1. (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
#2. To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.
Lucille Clifton
#3. I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.
Edward Albee
#4. The good poet sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race.
Karl Shapiro
#5. Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.
William Shenstone
#6. Like my old mentor would always say, Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice and I'll be dead.' Okay, she wasn't a good poet, but that lady could handle her whiskey.
John Zakour
#7. It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.
Clive James
#8. If I were to have a dream job, it would probably be a poet. Then again, I don't think I'm a very good poet!
Jack Gleeson
#9. And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.
Norman MacCaig
#10. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.
T. S. Eliot
#11. Bonaparte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and the same way the good soldier, the good astronomer, the good poet, the good player.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#12. Poetry is no rocket science, a good poet writes from his heart!
Saru Singhal
#14. I don't believe a good poet is very often deliberately obscure. A poet writes in a way necessary to him or her; the reader may then find the poem difficult.
Lydia Davis
#15. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.
T. S. Eliot
#16. 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
#17. If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.
Socrates
#18. There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
Anthony Hecht
#19. If men will impartially, and not asquint, look toward the offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of any man's being a good poet without first being a good man.
Ben Jonson
#20. Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.
Mark Doty
#21. Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.
Dorianne Laux
#22. A good poet feels what his community feels.
Like if you stub your toe, the rest of your body hurts.
Gil Scott-Heron
#23. A good poet's made as well as born.
Ben Jonson
#24. Are you really going to see Lewis? One of the few people it's worth getting excited over, I think. I know he is a good poet. I daresay he never heard of me, but I wish you would tell him that his work is the joy of my life.
Ruth Pitter
#25. He was a great poet" They lamented.
No, he was not a great poet," said Theo, "He was a good poet, he could have been better. That's the real loss don't you see?
Lloyd Alexander
#26. Before I went on stage at Kyle Hutton's Real Life Real Music Festival, I heard one of his songwriting students, Abbey Hirvela, sing; she was in the poet's saddle and riding that horse like she owned it. She was good! I probably ruined her by showing her how to make an E chord without the 3rd though.
Ray Wylie Hubbard
#27. Just because a poet said something didn't mean it was true, only that it sounded good.
Janet Fitch
#28. There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
Philip Larkin
#29. A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.
Eugene Field
#30. The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.
John Drinkwater
#31. The starving poet business is no good nowadays.
Henrik Ibsen
#32. I think in terms of educating a group of readers, MFA programs are very good. I just think the model of MFA programs in which a young poet goes through the program, publishes a series of books, gets teaching jobs, that's a bit at risk.
Edward Hirsch
#33. 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.
Augustine Birrell
#34. I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted.
Colum McCann
#35. You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good.
Dorianne Laux
#36. I think I was about twenty-five when I first said - more or less to myself - that I was quite a good second-rate poet. I repeated it aloud in a Guardian interview in 1976, and some people thought I was a coy old thing.
John Pudney
#37. She moved in for a better look.It was a portrait of Bob Marley,a pretty good one,actually.No Woman, No Cry ... that's right.No teenage girls either.All right,ten points if you'Re a poet,minus twenty-five if you're in a band and minus fifty if you're into the ganja.
Sheri Meshal
#38. Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#39. Is he a poet? Or a genuine one? An emancipator? Or a subjugator? A good one? Or an evil one?
Friedrich Nietzsche
#40. Take time for good books; time to absorb the thoughts of poets and philosophers, seers and prophets.
Wilferd Peterson
#41. I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.
Edward Hirsch
#43. Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.
James Laughlin
#44. Good or bad, positive or negative, there is no comment more insulting to a poet than one displaying that you have not properly read and considered the things they wrote.
Jasper Sole
#46. 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.
Huston Smith
#47. In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
W. H. Auden
#48. How are his poems?"
"He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.
Charles Bukowski
#49. I happen to believe that there are a lot of good poets around at present, but a poet like Alex Kuo, who possesses a highly developed moral sense and a bitter honesty, is rare at any time and especially in this time. We need him.
Carolyn Kizer
#50. I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.
James Laughlin
#51. A good poem has its own life. It's like bringing a child into the world. You, the poet, birthed the child, but the child will surprise you continually. I think a work of art has its own aliveness, its own future.
David Whyte
#52. A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
Orson Welles
#53. We do not go gentle, as your poet encourages, into that good night.
Rin Chupeco
#54. A poet is one who can call forth the good latent in the human beast.
Mahatma Gandhi
#55. The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white.
Jonathan Lethem
#56. The reason why Matthew Arnold, to my feeling, fails entirely as a poet (though no doubt his ideas were good - at least, I am told they were) is that he had no sense of touch whatsoever. Nothing made any impression on his skin. He could feel neither the shape nor the texture of a poem with his hands.
Edith Sitwell
#57. My brother told me I was going to be a poet. I had a good brother. He did a lot of good brotherly work.
Marilynne Robinson
#58. Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe ... I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.
Derek Walcott
#59. Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.
Bertolt Brecht
#60. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.
Oscar Wilde
#61. A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.
Sherman Alexie
#62. I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.
Leslie Fiedler
#63. You are not an artist simply because you paint or sculpt or make pots that cannot be used. An artist is a poet in his or her own medium. And when an artist produces a good piece, that work has mystery, an unsaid quality; it is alive.
Toshiko Takaezu
#64. The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.
Imogen Cunningham
#65. Remember that good poets too can write bad poems! Talent has also a talent to be untalented!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#66. All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual.
Helen Vendler
#67. I am hopelessly divided between the dark and the good, the rebel and the saint, the sex maniac and the monk, the poet and the priest, the demagogue and the populist. Pen to paper, I've put it all down, every bit from the heart.
I'm going out on a limb here, so watch my back.
Billy Idol
#68. I plan to be a sinner tonight. Could've been something else, but looked way too good in my red dress to be anything Christian.
Alysia Harris
#69. The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.
Fernando Pessoa
#70. A poet may be a good companion, but, so far as I know, he is ever the worst of fathers.
Irving Bacheller
#71. If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.
Randall Jarrell
#72. Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don't let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, "honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry." Good to remember ...
Elif Shafak
#73. If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
Ben Lerner
#74. In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#75. 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
#76. "Look into thy heart and write!" is good advice, but not if interpreted to mean, "Look nowhere else!" The poet should know his world and, so far as his art is concerned, any kind of battering from his world is better than his own self-indulgent brooding.
Harriet Monroe
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. The force of originality "that made Donne so potent an influence in the seventeenth century makes him now at once for us, without his being the less felt as of his period, contemporary - obviously a living poet in the most important sense." In "The Good-Morrow" Leavis said that
John Donne
#82. Dulness! whose good old cause I yet defend,
With whom my muse began, with who shall end.
Alexander Pope
#83. The poet's pen is the true divining rod Which trembles towards the inner founts of feeling; Bringing to light and use, else hid from all, The many sweet clear sources which we have of good and beauty in our own deep bosoms; And marks the variations of all mind As does the needle.
Philip James Bailey
#84. Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? Is there any other work for him but a good journal? We do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day.
Henry David Thoreau
#85. Jim, as just a spoken poet, was not that good. He needed the music behind him. He felt a security and a sense of abandon when the music existed around him.
Ray Manzarek
#86. Sometimes it is good to breach the rules
so as to achieve an end,
Yet keep an edge and not break or bend.
Mira Midha
#87. The scarily brilliant Romantic poet and visionary William Blake dared to say what many of us have perhaps thought but kept to ourselves: A good local pub has much in common with a church, except that a pub is warmer, and there's more conversation.
Brian D. McLaren
#88. I once tried hawking my own book around the pubs in the hope that, like the Salvation Army, I too could sell to the cerebrally relaxed. It was a disaster. I had beer thrown over me for being a) a nuisance, b) not as good as Wordsworth and c) a nancy for writing poetry in the first place.
Peter Finch
#89. There is no good or bad author; there is only one kind of an author, that who connects with the readers.
Saru Singhal
#90. A jazz musician is a combination orator, dialectician, mathematician, athlete, entertainer, poet, singer, dancer, diplomat, educator, student, comedian, artist, seducer, public masturbator, and general all-round good fellow.
Steve Lacy
#92. I'd rather be a great bad poet than a good bad poet.
Ogden Nash
#94. The poet is individual - he is complete in himself: the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and they do not.
Walt Whitman
#95. I have always wanted to play different kinds of stuff, but it's hard, first to find good material, and then to change people's perception of you so they'll let you do it. I mean, I would really like to play a poet, but once they get this notion of you as a street guy, it's hard to change that.
Matt Dillon
#96. A poet can always find something good to write about.
Colleen Houck
#98. Technology will never rescue anyone from being a bad poet, but if you're good, it has the potential to do a lot of exciting things.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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