Old Poet Quotes

#1. That is all. Two epochs met.
A silly little girl and an old poet.

Lina Kostenko

#2. An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.

Stanley Kunitz

#3. The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.

Henry David Thoreau

#4. Married or unmarried, young or old, poet or worker, you are still a dreamer, and will one time know, and feel, that your life is but a dream.

Donald G. Mitchell

#5. Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master ... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

Charles Bukowski

#6. I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he's written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading.

Philip Larkin

#7. If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.

Annie Dillard

#8. There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, 'Truth is the daughter of Time.'

Abraham Lincoln

#9. Justice is in the hands of the gods, an old poet wrote, mortal hands hold only mercy and the sword.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#10. An old poet, Robert Herrick, put it like this: " Our life is short, and our days run As fast away as does the sun; And, as a vapour or a drop of rain Once lost, can ne'er be found again.

Douglas Preston

#11. Bob Altman got nothing from the TV series 'M*A*S*H,' and the royalties for the theme song went to his oldest son, Michael, who wrote it as a 15-year-old poet!

Mitchell Zuckoff

#12. I was struck, as always, that a heathen poet from long ago should know so much of the human heart, and how little that heart changes, though great cities fall and new dispensations sweep away the old and pagan creeds.

Geraldine Brooks

#13. Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.

Robert Lowell

#14. But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.

Philip Levine

#15. It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back.

Marianne Moore

#16. Ted Hughes has been appointed poet laureate to succeed Sir John Betjeman, which is a bit like appointing a grim young crow to replace a cuddly old teddy bear.

Philip Howard, 20th Earl Of Arundel

#17. The poet, while creating anew, is likely to be in a sense restoring something old.

Owen Barfield

#18. And if other old men must be willing, at the end, to push up off their deathbed and adventure out into the unknown, how much more willing must that man be whose whole life has been just such a daily exercise of adventuring, even in the stillness of his own garden? I mean, the poet.

David Malouf

#19. Like an inspired and prolific poet, who never refuses to spread beauty to the humblest places, which until now did not seem to share the domain of art, the sun still warmed the bountiful energy of the dung heap, of the unevenly paved yard, and of the pear tree worn down like an old serving maid.

Marcel Proust

#20. He led quite a great life, ... He was an Old Testament figure railing against the establishment - a Jewish guy from New York who became a Buddhist, a poet, a musician.

Tom Hayden

#21. There is an old Latin quotation in regard to the poet which says 'Poeta nascitur non fit' the translation of which is - the poet is born, not made.

Joseph Devlin

#22. I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

#23. In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#24. 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

#25. A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

H.L. Mencken

#26. When the old poets made some virtue their theme, they were not teaching but adoring,

Alister E. McGrath

#27. We all have a god and a poet inside us. The poet, the human; the god, the divine.
It is by the grace of our god that we can find the divine inspiration with which to wax poetic about our human experiences.

Michele Jennae

#28. Time eateth all things, could old poets say, The times are chang'd, our times drink all away.

Benjamin Franklin

#29. Every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum ) and can never recur. That nothing shd. be old or borrowed however cannot be.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

#30. Old empires always appeal to modern poets more than new ones.

Dana Gioia

#31. And what is the problem? It is the old problem of the anxious searcher - the mythic in the interior castle, the poet-pilgrim in a dark wood not sure how to proceed. Which way is the right way?

Paul Elie

#32. 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

#33. It was among farmers and potato diggers and old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul.

Lady Gregory

#34. I actually started out as a poet in high school. I published in small literary magazines for probably about ten years. I entered the Yale Younger Poet contest every year, until I was too old to be a younger poet, and I never got more than a form rejection letter from them.

L.E. Modesitt Jr.

#35. 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

#36. Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.

Czeslaw Milosz

#37. The poet's body even is not fed like other men's, but he sometimes tastes the genuine nectar and ambrosia of the gods, and lives adivine life. By the healthful and invigorating thrills of inspiration his life is preserved to a serene old age.

Henry David Thoreau

#38. And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.

Virginia Woolf

#39. Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.

Sinclair Lewis

#40. One's sense of honor is the only thing that does not grow old, and the last pleasure, when one is worn out with age, is not, as the poet said, making money, but having the respect of one's fellow men.

Thucydides

#41. Imagine a twelve-year-old-girl.
Imagine her being attacked, raped and murdered.
Take your time.
Then imagine God.
M. Barin, poet

Hakan Nesser

#42. 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

#43. For now the poet cannot die, Nor leave his music as of old, But round him ere he scarce be cold Begins the scandal and the cry.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. Dulness! whose good old cause I yet defend,
With whom my muse began, with who shall end.

Alexander Pope

#47. Nihil humanum a me alienum puto, said the Roman poet Terence: 'Nothing human is alien to me.' The slogan of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service could have been the reverse: To us, no aliens are human.

Christopher Hitchens

#48. I had been up all night with my old friend Allen Ginsberg, the poet, and we had both slid into the abyss of whiskey madness and full-bore substance abuse. It was wonderful,

Hunter S. Thompson

#49. Though the cross of Christ has been beautified by the poet and the artist, the avid seeker after God is likely to find it the same savage implement of destruction it was in the days of old. The way of the cross is still the pain-wracked path to spiritual power and fruitfulness.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

#50. 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

#51. There is an old Arabic proverb, 'When the king puts the poet on his payroll, he cuts off the tongue of the poet', so throughout the ages, people in power have liked to control music, they used to throw songwriters in jail throughout history, and were assassinated.

Pete Seeger

#52. I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.

H.L. Mencken

#53. Turn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but a poet; for a poet is worse, more servile, timorous and fawning than any I have named.

William Congreve

#54. By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been.

Ruth Reichl

#55. Wolverine is a world-weary old warrior. His rage issue notwithstanding, I see him as someone with the tortured soul of a poet, but one who has seen too many friends and lovers die. Even with that, he has grown into a leader and a true hero.

Jonathan Maberry