Top 100 People's Poet Quotes
#1. If I'm the people's poet, then I ought to be in people's hands - and, I hope, in their heart.
Maya Angelou
#2. 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
#3. illustrated magazine: Nekrasov, 'the people's poet' (see note 15), was a contributor to Spark, an illustrated satirical journal published in Petersburg from 1859 to 1873.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Being engaged with life. One has to develop a poet's eye for perfect moments, moments that most people pass by.
Jewel
#7. if you
don't want to
end up in
someone else's
poem,
then maybe
you should
start
treating
people
better
for
a
change.
- an unapologetic poet.
Amanda Lovelace
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no 'morality'. For what's 'morality' but a leash around the neck? A noose? What's 'morality' but what other people want you to do, for their own, selfish, unstated purposes?
Joyce Carol Oates
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. A poet is never one of the people. He is detached, remote, and the life of small-time dances and talk about football would not be for him. He might take part but could not belong.
Patrick Kavanagh
#14. I always admire writers. My father was a writer, a poet. I always admire people who can clearly state their mind.
Ai Weiwei
#15. SO MANY PEOPLE, SO FEW POETS
Amy King
#16. I'm not a poet. I'm not up onstage to get something off my chest. I'm making musical statements, or, most of the time, musical questions for people to figure out, and I'm not going to get in the way of that.
Mike Patton
#18. The most mesmerizing of artists is always like one who was merely drawing in the sand and people came to watch.
Criss Jami
#19. I mean, in the history of poetry there have been a lot poetries where you have to inherit the position of poet from your ancestors and I think that if you just leave anyone to become a poet based on an aristocratic society, then a lot of people are left out who might have something to offer.
Edward Hirsch
#20. I had begun to suspect, however, that there is a poet - or a kind of poet - buried in every human being like Ariel in his tree, and that the people whom we are pleased to call poets are only those who have felt the need and contrived the means to release this spirit from its prison
James Dickey
#21. The poet was a fool
who wanted no conflict
among us, gods
or people.
Harmony needs
low and high,
as progeny needs
man and woman.
Heraclitus
#22. Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour.
W. Somerset Maugham
#23. The people must grant a hearing to the best poets they have else they will never have better.
Harriet Monroe
#24. As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories.
Pankaj Mishra
#25. Some people are suspicious of others who have more than one talent. I've had poets tell me to my face that an actress can't be a poet.
Grace Zabriskie
#26. Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if we all got along. If there were no terrorism, Islamophobia, Western hypocrisy, corrupt government in African countries (especially Liberia), sexism, nativism, people like Donald Trump, stereotypes, war, Capitalism, Communism, Marxism and xenophobia.
Henry Johnson Jr
#27. Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!
Alan Moore
#28. One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.
Nathalie Sarraute
#29. The poet's function is to make his imagination ... become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.
Wallace Stevens
#30. My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
John Lennon
#31. People think, 'Oh my goodness! I have to do something really big.' You don't. Do what you love. There's a great quote from a poet I use all the time: 'Instead of asking what the world needs, ask yourself what you love,' because what the world needs is more people doing what they love.
Maria Shriver
#32. Folks say I've never been quite right since - but they only say that because I'm a poet, and because nothing ever worries me. Poets are so rare in Blair Water folks don't understand them, and most people worry so much, they think you're not right if you don't worry.
L.M. Montgomery
#33. The best bribe which London offers to-day to the imagination, is, that, in such a vast variety of people and conditions, one can believe there is room for persons of romantic character to exist, and that the poet, the mystic, and the hero may hope to confront their counterparts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#34. My father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet, so I had one right inside the house. And on long trips, he'd tell me, if I got bored in the car, to write a poem about it. And I did find that poetry was a way for me, I think as it for a lot of people, to articulate those things that seem hardest to say.
Natasha Trethewey
#35. Many luckless people imagine that romance is dead: some, overcivilised, fondly suppose that there never was romance: a poet tells us that romance is unrecognised though really present: but scientists can meet him daily, walking at large and undisguised in the world.
Archibald Hill
#36. The morning news hour ends with Evelyna Salsdottir, the champion poet of New Asgard, reciting her award-winning song "Sunfall in Mesa Verde." It's about vanishing people, and the memories they leave behind, like the longest shadows cast as the sun sets.
Tessa Gratton
#37. We're football people, not poets, but obviously I'm disappointed with the result.
Mick McCarthy
#38. 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
#39. When people have a hard task to do - one which stretches them - they become less concerned with trivial matters.
Idries Shah
#40. 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
#41. I'm a political poet - let us say a 'human' poet, a poet that's concerned with the plight of people who suffer. If words can be of assistance, then that's what I'm going to use.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#42. With fame, money and sex settled, he had to find something else to fight, and like any honorable man he chose to fight his own people. And that was how Byron the sentimental poet of graveyards and lost loves became the Satanic joker all England loved to hate.
John C. Dolan
#43. I hope that most people at this point in time realize that Prince is one of the great poets of our time. I didn't say songwriter - I said poet. Prince is the closest thing we have to e. e. cummings and people are so stupid because they don't come in here and buy books of Prince poems. It
Caroline Kepnes
#44. I had to learn quick, because I was performing in Cinco de Mayo festivals with babies crying and people lifting their beers, and you know the feather dancers would come, and they'd say, "What are you, a poet? You're next".
Sandra Cisneros
#45. Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other
people passes by, far in the distance.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#46. Cats are to dogs what modern people are to the people we used to have. Cats are slimmer, cleaner, more attractive, disloyal, and lazy. It's easy to understand why the cat has eclipsed the dog as modern America's favorite poet. People like poets to possess the same qualities they do.
P. J. O'Rourke
#47. A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it.
Keegan-Michael Key
#48. It is bizarre that some people can't understand how a serious poet could work at a finance firm. Goethe was a bureaucrat. Eliot worked as a banker.
Katy Lederer
#49. The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand ... We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.
Jean Cocteau
#50. Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.
Steve Earle
#51. Everyone is a poet at 16, but how many are poets at 50? Generally, people seem to get more conservative as they age, but in my case, I seem to have gotten more radical.
Fidel Castro
#52. When people start talking about enjambment and line endings, I always shut them up. This is not something to talk about, this is a private matter, it's up to the poet.
James Tate
#54. Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?
William Stafford
#55. 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
#56. So, I've never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don't want to be read as just a black poet, or just a woman poet, or just someone who represents a cause, an anti-Vietnam war poet.
Diane Wakoski
#57. And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.
Peter Davison
#58. I'm a poet. I distrust anything that starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop because people don't think in full, clear sentences.
Antjie Krog
#59. For a poet the world is always static in the sense that you're a mass observer and you can't afford to care whether people are busy or not. You're a witness.
Iain Sinclair
#60. Damn everything but the circus! ... The average 'painter' 'sculptor' 'poet' 'composer' 'playwright' is a person who cannot leap through a hoop from the back of a galloping horse, make people laugh with a clown's mouth, orchestrate twenty lions.
E. E. Cummings
#61. Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.
Paul Muldoon
#62. I got a head full of headaches, a heart that's full of woes.
I'm constantly singin' them down home blues, and not many people knows
That leaves me with a twisted view of the whole wide world as I know it ...
And I guess I got no choice but to be a poet.
Aceyalone
#63. I'd like people to remember me for a diligent expert workman. I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God's a workman. I don't think there's anything better than a workman.
Laurence Olivier
#64. A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner; nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#65. This is just rap. I'm not trying to make people think I'm some sort of scientific wizard or inspirational poet.
Action Bronson
#66. Don't live in the world as if you were renting or here only for the summer, but act as if it was your father's house ... Believe in seeds, earth, and the sea, but people above all. Love clouds, machines, and books, but people above all. Nazim Hikmet, 20th century Turkish poet
Nahid Rachlin
#67. "You're next, after the feather dancers." And you had to get their attention, because otherwise people would go, "Oh, a poet." You really have to learn.
Sandra Cisneros
#68. I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.
Ted Hughes
#69. I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what's really on my mind.
Christina Aguilera
#70. I mean the most important thing you can have as an actor, writer, director, or whatever you are, poet or whatever it is, is life experience. Life experience doesn't mean you have to live 50 years to have it. I mean you know a lot of people have huge life experience by the time they're in college.
Billy Bob Thornton
#71. 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
#72. People can't see that if I had not been a poet, I could never have had such success as a traveler.
Bayard Taylor
#73. 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
#74. Heard ten thousand whispering and nobody listening. Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughing. Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter.
Bob Dylan
#75. 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
#76. You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.
Bob Dylan
#77. Mercer didn't know, but Lost Illusions was one of his personal favorites. Basically, a young poet from the provinces comes to Paris to make his fortune and, in the fullness of time, discovers that he's been wrong about everything. All the people he takes for geniuses are idiots, and vice versa.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#78. The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own.
Barbara Holland
#79. The poet must be free to love or hate as the spirit moves him, free to change, free to be a chameleon, free to be an enfant terrible. He must above all never worry about this effect on other people.
May Sarton
#80. The job of the poet is to render the world-to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
Mark Van Doren
#81. Girl Tractorist: As the poet Mayakovsky said: "The home of the Soviet people shall be the home of Reason"!
Bertolt Brecht
#82. Hence as the poet says: People in love cannot be moved by kindness, And opposition makes them feel like martyrs.
C.S. Lewis
#83. People differ to such a degree they agree on nothing,
Except death that is, and even on that they disagree.
Some say the soul goes on after the death of the body
While others claim the soul, with the body, dies too.
Mutannabi
#84. Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization.
Wallace Stegner
#85. Even if you're a poet sitting in your room writing a poem, you're still in the world - although I guess being a poet is a different than having to deal with 40 or 50 people to raise a couple million bucks and all that bullshit.
Abel Ferrara
#86. The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.
Jane Kenyon
#87. It should be emphasized that the balagtasan also served a higher social and political function. More than mere entertainment, it enhanced the tradition role of the poet as purveyor of truth for the people.
Virgilio S. Almario
#88. The poet's nature is all searching, creator and nourisher of desire; the poet is like the heart in a people's breast, a people without a poet is a mere heap of clay. If the purpose of poetry is the fashioning of men, poetry is likewise the heir of prophecy.
Muhammad Iqbal
#89. Anybody who instantly goes from being a poet and a graduate student to being a public figure has to be in a state of shock. First people want to praise you, and then they want to attack you. No one can prepare you for it.
Erica Jong
#90. A poem is a naked person ... Some people say that I am a poet.
Bob Dylan
#91. Let's detox our cluttered academic brain. That's what the poet does. People call it daydreaming, detoxing our minds and taking care of that clutter. It's being able to let in call letters from the poetry universe.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#92. I prefer people to consider me by who I am and what I do and not by how I look!
Gayathri Jayakumar
#93. I think there's a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that's music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative - they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever.
Stewart Butterfield
#94. 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
#96. POET
If not in a place, where are the People weeping?
LIBERAL
They creep weeping in the face, not place.
POET
Is it something with which we may cope
The weeping, the creeping, the peepee-ing, the peeping?
Allen Tate
#97. A poet can't afford to be aloof. The tools of his trade are the people he bumps up against.
Rod McKuen
#98. 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
#99. to be a fiction writer, you also need to be a psychologist (understanding people's personalities and intentions), a philosopher (asking big questions about meaning and human nature), and a poet (breathing life into your words and the spaces between them).
Steven James
#100. People write me from all over the country, asking me, and sometimes even telling me, what they think a poet laureate should do. I found that immensely valuable.
Rita Dove
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