Top 99 I Am A Poet Quotes
#1. A poem is a naked person ... Some people say that I am a poet.
Bob Dylan
#2. I am a poet who composes what life proses, and who proses what life composes.
Khalil Gibran
#3. Paint in blue and black ... sometimes gray - the colors of night - occasionally I surprise you with a mustard yellow, but then, I am a poet ...
John Geddes
#4. My child, you have a flawed grasp of the nature of myth-making. I am a poet and storyteller, a creator of ballads and sagas. Pray do not confuse the exercise of the imagination with mere mendacity. I am a master of the mysteries of words, their meanings and music and mellifluous magic.
Frances Hardinge
#5. I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.
Erica Jong
#6. There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
Philip Levine
#7. Since I have the obligation to take care of the needs of my family, I have decided to use a talent which, I believe, has been given to me. I am a poet ... Phew! You know, reader, what I and all sensible people think about that.
Multatuli
#8. I am not a painter. I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.
Frank O'Hara
#10. 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
#11. In truth, I'm still slightly embarrassed to say, I am a poet. I'd rather say, I make poems.
Henri Cole
#12. I am a poet in deeds--not often in words.
Ian Fleming
#13. They say that I am a poet I wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottle emotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle on distant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and for that matter as to whether I ever get my point across or my love
Saul Williams
#17. As I am a poet I express what I believe, and I fight against whatever I oppose, in poetry.
June Jordan
#18. Another lover hits the universe. The circle is broken. But with death comes rebirth. And like all lovers and sad people, I am a poet.
Allen Ginsberg
#19. In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems.
Tony Buzan
#20. And so I just grieve, groaning,
'Let me not go
To the Place of the Shorn:
My heart is now precious ...
For I, I am a poet
And my flower is golden.
David Bowles
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. I have decided to be a poet. My father said there isn't a suitable career structure for poets and no pensions and other boring things, but I am quite decided.
Sue Townsend
#24. 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
#25. I have no connections here; only gusty collisions,
rootless seedlings forced into bloom, that collapse.
...
I am the Visiting Poet: a real unicorn,
a wind-up plush dodo, a wax museum of the Movement.
People want to push the buttons and see me glow.
Marge Piercy
#26. I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.
Michael Faraday
#27. I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.
Maya Angelou
#28. I'm not a poet and I'm not a nature lover and I'm not an Anarchist. I am, thank God, absolutely nothing.
Nescio
#29. Tell me, cat-man, why can I understand her?"
"First," said Eanrin with a glower, "you will not call me 'cat-man' again. I am a knight, a poet, and a gentleman, and you will address me as sir or not address me at all.
Anne Elisabeth Stengl
#31. I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate
into a new tongue.
Walt Whitman
#32. If told I am a bad poet, I smile; but if told I am a poor scholar, I reach for my heaviest dictionary.
Vladimir Nabokov
#33. I don't think that I ever believed that poetry would be a career. I have always thought of poems as something more private than professional ... I would never introduce myself as a poet. I will always have some other thing that I am.
Dana Goodyear
#34. I am a revolutionary, so my son can be a farmer, so his son can be a poet.
John Adams
#35. I am a great admirer of Robert Vavra and love his beautiful photographs and books. He is a wonderful artist, a poet ...
Leni Riefenstahl
#36. The tradition of the personal essay is full of self-appointed outcasts. In that tradition, I am not a poet or the press, but an essayist, a citizen thinker.
Eula Biss
#37. I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.
John Quincy Adams
#38. I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems.
Robert Frost
#39. If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'
Philip Larkin
#40. To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.
W. H. Auden
#42. I am a philosopher in the natural sciences. Matters of the heart I leave to the poets, but it has occurred to me, as a failed poet myself, that the cruelest aspect of love is its inviolable integrity. We do not choose to love - or I should say, we cannot choose not to love. Do you understand?
Rick Yancey
#43. If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.
Countee Cullen
#44. Thousands of years ago, a Roman poet wrote, "I am a human being, therefore nothing human is foreign to me." I believe it to be true. So if this is possible for one human, it is possible for anyone. The path might be different, but the destination same.
Kamal Ravikant
#45. I always was a rebel ... but on the other hand, I wanted to be loved and accepted ... and not just be a loudmouth, lunatic, poet, musician. But I cannot be what I am not.
John Lennon
#47. I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of a man.
Walt Whitman
#48. You ask me to write you a poem,
I pen you an empty ocean,
You run away.
You ask me who I am,
I paint you a breaking sky,
You weep in the rain.
Jenim Dibie
#49. 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 ...
William Butler Yeats
#50. I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it
Marianne Moore
#51. Would anyone but a crazed bicephalous being, half engineer, half poet, willingly shackle himself to a venture of such magnitude? I am prisoner of my dream.
Philippe Petit
#52. The orange blossom would have scarcely withered on the grave', as a poet might have said. But I am not poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder.
Vladimir Nabokov
#53. I am a warrior, that my son may be a merchant - and his son may be a poet.
Diana Gabaldon
#54. Perhaps ... I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am a lesbian, because I am myself
a Black woman warrior poet doing my work
come to ask you, are you doing yours?
Audre Lorde
#55. I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.
Jose Saramago
#56. I have decided, it is fruitless. For I am no longer sure of anything concerning my existance. A philosopher is a dead poet and a dying theologian.
Roger Zelazny
#58. I am a butterfly poet
birthed from pain
flying with the freedom
of my verses.
Susie Clevenger
#59. I am tired of this city. I am tired of its pagan pretensions and false histories. Hyperion is a poet's world devoid of poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy.
Dan Simmons
#60. It's wonderful to know that the power to define who I am rests solely with me. If I decide I am an artist, or a poet, a teacher or a writer then I AM.
Renae A. Sauter
#61. I am a lover of love and I am a lover of words, and the two together spin visions of airy castles, but also may pierce the heart of hope. And so I remind you that I am a fool, a poet, and what matters is reality, not lovely words. Words are full of promise, yet empty of matter.
Waylon H. Lewis
#62. I too am a poet who has found some favour with the Muse. I too have written songs. I too have heard the shepherds call me bard. But I take it from them with a grain of salt: I have the feeling that I cannot yet compare with Varius or Cinna, but cackle like a goose among melodious swans.
Virgil
#63. I think that as a poet, I am always concerned about history and baring witness to history. But so often, it's through the research that I do, the reading.
Natasha Trethewey
#64. All that I am is me. So I'm not really a poet or a writer or an actor or an activist; I'm me, and these are things that I do.
John Trudell
#65. I'm a fiction writer, and I do write essays, but I am not a poet. And I absolutely reject the phrase 'woman writer' as anti-feminist. I wrote an essay about this as far back as 1977, at the height of the neo-feminist movement.
Cynthia Ozick
#66. I've been trying to come to terms with what I am and what I do and what I believe in. And I see that I'm not happy with - well, it's almost as if being a poet is not enough for me. It's too late for me to do more now. I did what I could in a small way. I did it as theater, too, to be honest.
Gerald Stern
#67. For instance, I remember someone asking Sophocles, the poet, whether he was still capable of enjoying a woman. 'Don't talk in that way,' he answered; 'I am only too glad to be free of all that; it is like escaping from bondage to a raging madman.
Plato
#68. I am merely a poet dying far from home.
Dan Simmons
#69. 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
#70. I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.
Edmund Wilson
#71. Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.
Natasha Trethewey
#72. I know as well as thee that I am no poet born
It is a trade, I never learnt nor indeed could learn
If I make verses-'tis in spite
Of nature and my stars I write.
Benjamin Franklin
#73. What am I going to do with ye, Grace? First, ye blacken my eye, and then ye slice me in the thigh." He chuckled. "I bet ye ne'er knew I was a poet, did ye?"
When he felt her hand pat him, he chuckled. "Ye cannae get enough of me, can ye?"
"Pardon?"
"Och, lass. That isnae my thigh.
Victoria Roberts
#74. Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.
'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem.
Karen Tei Yamashita
#75. But you have to understand that I consider myself a very modest artist, or whatever, and not of importance really at all - it is quite embarrassing to me to be asked my opinion about things. I am only a wee Scottish poet on the outside of everything.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
#76. I am a writer because I write, an author because I create, a poet because the words are in my soul.
Wesley D. Gray
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. If I am not mistaken, it was a British poet who said that 'no one is properly dressed unless he wears a smile.'
Sukarno
#80. Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She's not a symbol.
Mahmoud Darwish
#81. Perhaps already I am dead, And these perhaps are phantoms vain; - These motley phantasies that pass At night through my disordered brain. Perhaps with ancient heathen shapes, Old faded gods, this brain is full; Who, for their most unholy rites, Have chosen a dead poet's skull ...
Heinrich Heine
#82. I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
#83. Blake said Milton was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it. I am of the Devil's party and know it.
Philip Pullman
#84. In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don't care about my cinema. In Europe, they don't know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!
Jonas Mekas
#85. I am an ordinary human being who is impelled to write poetry ... I still do feel that a poet has a duty to words, and that words can do wonderful things, and it's too bad to just let them lie there without doing anything with and for them.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#86. I am not just a lesbian. I am not just a poet. I am not just a mother. Honor the complexity of your vision and yourselves.
Audre Lorde
#87. I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.
Audre Lorde
#88. Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I've always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.
Patti Smith
#89. The young artist of today need no longer say 'I am a painter,' or 'a poet,' or 'a dancer.' He is simply an 'artist.' All of life will be open to him.
Allan Kaprow
#90. Love is a word, another kind of open.
As the diamond comes
into a knot of flame
I am Black
because I come from the earth's inside
take my word for jewel
in the open light.
Audre Lorde
#91. The poets get a quizzical ahem. They reflect time, I am the very ticking.
Roy Fuller
#92. I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/ Who says my hand a needle better fits./ A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong/ For such despite they cast on female wits;/ If what I do prove well, it won't advance,/ They'll say it's stolen, or else, it was by chance.
Anne Bradstreet
#93. No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet.
Claude Monet
#94. I do not understand why any poet or writer would run for office; that's a different sense of who you are. I'm just a poet. I am as truthful as I can be. That makes me an artist. I heed the people; I do not lead the people.
Nikki Giovanni
#95. I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem, and now am neither,
A.S. Byatt
#96. I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe that I will return. Poets always return in flesh or on paper.
Joseph Brodsky
#97. Like the minor poet who knows the meanness of his gift, I am doomed to a lifetime of frustration: to be able to comprehend beauty, but not create it.
Elizabeth Bear
#98. I am a black man dedicated to expression; expression of the joy and pride of blackness. I consider myself neither poet, composer, or musician. These are merely tools used by sensitive men to carve out a piece of beauty or truth that they hope may lead to peace and salvation.
Gil Scott-Heron
#99. I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred million men march in step in a parody of order.
Julio Cortazar
