Top 100 Great Poet Sayings
#1. 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
#2. 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.
William Wordsworth
#3. I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming out of the music world, the two of them.
Clive Davis
#4. Baudelaire was far more than a great poet. He established the keyboard of a sensibility that still lives within us, if we are not total brutes.
Roberto Calasso
#5. One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
Umberto Eco
#6. Lewis said sadly to me, 'When I at last realized that I was not, after all, going to be a great man...' I think he meant 'a great poet.
Jocelyn Gibb
#7. The great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the mind.
Oscar Wilde
#8. I always thought I was going to be a great poet, and go and live in New York, where the great poets lived - you know, where Whitman had walked the streets.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#9. It always has been and forever will be impossible for slavery or any kind or form of injustice to produce a great poet.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#10. Like a great poet, nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means. There are simply a sun, flowers, water, and love.
Heinrich Heine
#11. A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet ... yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.
Edgar Allan Poe
#12. Goethe, the great poet-philosopher, once wrote: "I find more and more that it is well to be on the side of the minority, since it is always the more intelligent.
Humphrey Bancroft Neill
#13. A great poet does not express his or her self; he expresses all of our selves.
Gary Snyder
#14. 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
#15. I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.
Francois Mauriac
#16. To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language.
Octavio Paz
#18. There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#19. Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#20. But Racine's extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great psychologist.
Lytton Strachey
#21. No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet.
Claude Monet
#22. When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.
T. S. Eliot
#23. The great poet is a great artist. He is painter and sculptor. The greatest pictures and statues have been painted and chiseled with words. They outlast all others.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#24. No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.
William Temple
#25. Many have genius, but, wanting art, are forever dumb. The two must go together to form the great poet, painter, or sculptor.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#26. Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spite of madness.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#27. Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.
T. S. Eliot
#28. The void yields up nothing. You have to be a great poet to make it ring.
Jules Renard
#29. 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.
Richard Flanagan
#30. 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
#31. The aim I have set before me in this book is to give back to English readers the understanding of and delight in this great poet which thrilled his contemporaries and early successors.
Janet Spens
#32. There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn't also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this.
Edward Hirsch
#33. Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.
Heinrich Heine
#34. I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.
Honore De Balzac
#35. 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?
James A. McDougall
#36. A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#37. Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.
Aravind Adiga
#38. Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. - A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom on the seventh day of creation.
Lewis Cass
#39. 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.
Walt Whitman
#40. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.
Virginia Woolf
#41. Whatever is genuine in social relations endures, despite of time, error, absence, and destiny; and that which has no inherent vitality had better die at once. A great poet has truly declared that constancy is no virtue, but a fact.
Henry Theodore Tuckerman
#42. 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
#43. But I'm a woman, and as the great poet so cleverly wrote, hell
hath no fury as a woman scorned. Consider me your personal hell.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#44. When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship.
David Mitchell
#46. 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
#47. I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet.
Lord Chesterfield
#48. He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#49. Some great poet or philosopher once said that " he who goes to nature for comfort must go to her empty handed " , and I think he was right.
Flora Thompson
#50. Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.
Virginia Woolf
#51. A great poet can give nobler and more precious gifts to his country than the greatest philanthropist or politician.
Orna Ross
#52. You can't be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it.
Kenneth Koch
#53. A great poet can give wings to abstract thoughts that touch a reader's mind with the ecstasy of joy.
Debasish Mridha
#55. [Thanatopsis] was written in 1817, when Bryant was 23. Had he died then, the world would have thought it had lost a great poet. But he lived on.
William C. Bryant
#56. The great poet Hafiz says that you should dye your prayer-carpet with wine if your teacher tells you to do so.
Idries Shah
#57. England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature
for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.
E. M. Forster
#58. To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
#59. No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#60. The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think less of his compositions. His best communication to our mind is to teach us to despise all he has done.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#61. One of the marks of a great poet is that he creates his own family of words and teaches them to live together in harmony and to help one another.
Gerald Brenan
#62. To paraphrase the great poet Dante, the heavens swirl above us and our eyes are still cast to the ground.
Vanna Bonta
#63. In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.
Kenneth Branagh
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.
Harold Bloom
#67. 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
#68. Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It (Gormenghast trilogy) is a very, very great work ... a classic of our age.
Mervyn Peake
#69. - As the poet Hebbel noted, "Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion." Executives know their development teams need to be passionate about their projects; otherwise, the projects and the company will remain mediocre.
Anonymous
#70. Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.
Greil Marcus
#71. Writing a successful novel is a great challenge, and you have to be a bit of a poet, a bit of a critic, a bit of a dramatist, a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a social scientist, to pull it off.
Anis Shivani
#72. For sometime now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true that we do not know it; but is it not just that which is most our own of which we know the least?
Rainer Maria Rilke
#73. Dear old al-Maarri was a great skeptic poet. He wrote a parody of the Koran, and his friends would tease him and say, "al-Maarri, but no one says your Koran." And he said, "Yes, but give me time. Give me time. If people recite it for twenty years it will become as popular as the other one."
Tariq Ali
#74. 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.
Isaac D'Israeli
#75. As the American poet, Marianne Moore, said: There is a great deal of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.
William Strunk Jr.
#76. A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered.
Lee Strasberg
#77. The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.
Loren Eiseley
#78. We used to play the underground clubs like the UFO, and Middle Earth, and they were great because they would have on things like a poet, string quartets, and then a rock band! It was kinda cool!
Alvin Lee
#79. I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.
Diane Wakoski
#80. People who think that Sylvia Plath was a poor, sensitive poet are not getting that she had great amounts of ambition and anger that moved her along, or she wouldn't have been able to fight against that depression to produce such an incredible body of work by the age of thirty.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#81. It takes something of a poet to apprehend and get into the depth, the lusciousness, the spiritual life of a great poem. And so we must be in some way like God in order that we may see God as He is.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#82. I'd rather be a great bad poet than a good bad poet.
Ogden Nash
#83. I walk with Federico Garcia Lorca around the Upper West Side in Manhattan because that was a neighborhood he lived in and I imagine walking around Paris with Cesar Vallejo, a great Peruvian poet who lived in Paris. And I kind of create the walk as a kind of drama of my apprenticeship.
Edward Hirsch
#84. I'm from the beatnik generation, where everybody wanted to be a poet or writer or something. And at that time, I was a jazz critic, and I was always thinking, theorizing about what makes great art or what's important in art.
Harvey Pekar
#85. Bangladesh is a world of metaphor, of high and low theater, of great poetry and music. You talk to a rice farmer and you find a poet. You get to know a sweeper of the streets and you find a remarkable singer.
Jean Houston
#86. It is telling that the first recorded name in history belongs to an accountant, rather than a prophet, a poet or a great conqueror.1
Yuval Noah Harari
#87. Dante Alighieri is a universal poet, and great creators, they are writing for everybody always. Every single verse is very moving, and the beauty - if we don't understand, we just stay listening to the sound and it's like hearing music.
Roberto Benigni
#88. poet convinced both of his own talent and of the need to be self-indulgent in order to be a great artist.
Walter Isaacson
#89. All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart ...
Edith Sitwell
#90. Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#91. The Church has lost a great religious poet in me; but I have lost an infinity of fun in the church, so the loss is even.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#92. The poet or the story-teller who cannot give the reader a little ghostly pleasure at times never can be either a really great writer or a great thinker.
Lafcadio Hearn
#93. [Abbas Kiarostami] is a great artist and a poet. I sometimes think that if Samuel Beckett made films, he'd make them like Kiarostami makes them.
Anthony Minghella
#94. All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#95. Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist.
Steven Seagal
#96. The great post-Holocaust poet, Paul Celan, said that a poem is a message in a bottle sent out in the not always greatly hopeful belief that somewhere and some time it would wash up on land on heartland perhaps.
Edward Hirsch
#97. Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were "I go to seek a Great Perhaps." That's why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.
John Green
#98. Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.
John Drinkwater
#99. A great ancient poet was blind. A great classical composer was deaf. Many of us are dumb. What have we to show for it?
Vera Nazarian
#100. The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.
Henry David Thoreau
