Top 100 Poet And Quotes
#1. Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief.
Bono
#2. I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.
Norman Lock
#3. 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
#4. A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything's going to be all right. you've made it past Dead Man's Curve and you're out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.
Haruki Murakami
#5. Our job is to become more and more of what we are. The growth of a poet seems to be related to his or her becoming less and less embarrassed about more and more.
Marvin Bell
#6. A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.
Douglas Dunn
#7. Ultimately you're trying to reach across and find some other person, some other human warmth. But it is, especially in written poetry, it is inscribed in a text and the text can't do that work by itself and you as a poet can only do your best.
Edward Hirsch
#8. A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world.
Johann Gottfried Herder
#9. If I could write the beauty of your eyes And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, 'This poet lies; Such heavenly touches ne'er touch'd earthly faces.'
William Shakespeare
#10. The historian must be a poet; not to find, but to find again; not to breathe life into beings, into imaginary deeds, but in order to re-animate and revive that which has been; to represent what time and space have placed at a distance from us.
Philibert Joseph Roux
#11. For a young and presumptuous poet a disposition to write satires is one of the most dangerous he can encourage. It tempts him to personalities, which are not always forgiven after he has repented and become ashamed of them.
Robert Southey
#12. He wanted to be a poet,' someone else put in while Maggie hugged Tim and patted his back. 'Said he'd only lacked the words to be one.
Nora Roberts
#13. 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
#14. The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.
William Shakespeare
#15. Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.
Charles Baudelaire
#16. A poet is a musician who can't sing. Words have to find a man's mind before they can touch his heart, and some men's minds are woeful small targets.
Patrick Rothfuss
#17. 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
#18. The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Robert Graves
#19. They are fools who kiss and tell'
Wisely has the poet sung.
Man may hold all sorts of posts
If he'll only hold his tongue.
Rudyard Kipling
#20. 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
#21. A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.
Cecil Day-Lewis
#22. The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#23. When you put a poem on a Kindle, the lines are broken in order to fit on the screen. And so instead of being the poet's decision, it becomes the device's decision.
Billy Collins
#24. Surely there is a knowing behind it all. There is a teacher, an expresser, a creator, an artist perhaps, a poet certainly that has designed and presented all of the clues that we need to navigate life with some degree of grace, and perhaps with a greater degree of happiness than we now have.
Jeffrey R. Anderson
#25. I have written a raucous valentine to a poet's dream and agony.
Ben Hecht
#26. I'm a poet who practices Zen. And it's not, I'm somebody who practices Zen who writes poetry. There's no separation for me.
Sam Hamill
#28. It's not that he doesn't appreciate beauty, he just appreciates it in his own way. I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany.
Terry Pratchett
#29. 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
#30. Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.
Carolyn Kizer
#31. An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad truth,
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,
And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#32. The poet, as a rule, is a half-man - a sissy, not a real person, and he is in no shape to lead real men in matters of blood, or courage.
Charles Bukowski
#33. Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.
Robert E. Howard
#34. It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road.
Donald Hall
#35. It is the black poet who bridges the gap in tradition, who modifies tradition when experience demands it, who translates experience into meaning and meaning into belief.
Henry Louis Gates
#36. Moscow, Rome, London, Paris stay in place. Leningrad and New York float, spreading all their sails, cutting space with their prows, and can disappear, if not in reality, then in the imagination of the poet creating a myth, a mythical tradition on the grounds of his secret experience.
Nina Berberova
#37. Every poem can be considered in two ways
as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
C.S. Lewis
#38. I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a children's author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first woman president.
Rachel Corrie
#39. 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
#40. A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.
Anna Brownell Jameson
#43. She lends her pen,
to thoughts of him,
that flow from it,
in her solitary.
For she is his poet,
And he is her poetry.
Lang Leav
#44. If there ever was a poet for the working class Billy Joe Shaver and Merle Haggard would be my nomination.
David Allan Coe
#45. 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
#46. Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.
Criss Jami
#47. I may as well tell you, here and now, that if you are going about the place thinking things pretty, you will never make a modern poet. Be poignant, man, be poignant!
P.G. Wodehouse
#48. The poet will maintain serenity in spite of all disappointments. He is expected to preserve an unconcerned and healthy outlook over the world, while he lives.
Henry David Thoreau
#49. Examine this statement: 'A woman cannot be a poet.' Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?
Jeanette Winterson
#50. One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes.
Donald Hall
#51. He [the poet] brings out the inner part of things and presents them to men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets themselves.
Hilaire Belloc
#52. What a lover's heart knows let no man's brain dispute.
Aberjhani
#53. In poetry, and in my study in graduate school, I was drawn to a particular poet, Theodore Roethke. I did a dissertation on "The Evolution of Matter and Spirit in the Poetry of Theodore Roethke" for my Ph.D.
Frederick Lenz
#54. A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he candivide.
Franz Grillparzer
#55. The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#56. Life. This morning the sun made me adore it. It had, behind the dripping pine trees, the oriental brightness, orange and crimson, of a living being, a rose and an apple, in the physical and ideal fusion of a true and daily paradise.
Juan Ramon Jimenez
#57. Today we should make poems including iron and steel And the poet should know how to lead an attack.
Ho Chi Minh
#58. Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.
Honore De Balzac
#59. Eggs I must instantly have!" she announced. "And Lope de Vega I will not have, though in general a fine poet, but not in the kitchen!
Georgette Heyer
#60. 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
#61. Both the poet and scholar are trying to learn something. The poem for me is a pursuit. Some of the answers are within. Some of the answers are without.
Gregory Pardlo
#62. 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
#63. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#64. I think that as long as you have other poets before you and that you can learn from them, then it's always open ended for you.
Edward Hirsch
#65. I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.
Carl Rakosi
#66. And when her biographer says of an Italian woman poet, 'during some years her Muse was intermitted,' we do not wonder at the fact when he casually mentions her ten children.
Anna Garlin Spencer
#67. At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.
Seth Godin
#68. Out of the ruined lodge and forgotten mansion, bowers that are trodden under foot, and pleasure-houses that are dust, the poet calls up a palingenesis.
Thomas De Quincey
#69. The poet has an obligation to dissect his own corpse and reveal the symptoms of its illness to the world.
Soseki Natsume
#71. The poet is he who fights on the passionate
Side and whoever loses he wins; when he
Is defeated it is hard to say who wins ...
Allen Tate
#72. The surname Messi comes from the Italian town of Porto Recanati, in the province of Macerata, which saw the birth of the poet Giacomo Leopardi and the tenor Beniamino Gigli.
Luca Caioli
#73. 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
#74. The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him.
Henry David Thoreau
#75. Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor ... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.
R.S. Thomas
#76. 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
#77. He who writes poetry is not a poet. He whose poetry has become his life, and who has made his life his poetry - it is he who is a poet.
Subramanya Bharathi
#78. Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
Matthew Arnold
#79. "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
#80. [On Elizabeth Barrett Browning:] ... for finish, and melody of versification, there is nothing approaching to Miss Barrett in this day, or in any other - also for diction. Her words paint.
Mary Russell Mitford
#81. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no identity-he is continually infirming and filling some other body.
John Keats
#82. brilliant and audacious as ever - a beat poet of paranoia. He
Jon Ronson
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Don't be afraid," he said. "Art is full of agony and beauty. The pen itself a sword of pleasure and pain, isn't it, my poet?
Lisa Carlisle
#86. To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world.
Maxine Kumin
#87. Therefore the whole apparatus of piety, Hindu and Moslem alike - the temple and mosque, idol and holy water, scriptures and priests - were denounced by this inconveniently clear-sighted poet as mere substitutes for reality; dead things intervening between the soul and its love -
Rabindranath Tagore
#88. A poet should always be 'collaborating' with his public, but this public, in the mass, cannot make itself heard, and he has to guess at its requirements and its criticisms.
Louis MacNeice
#89. Being a poet in the States is quite different from being one in China, because in the States poetry depends on the universities for its support. They finance the poets and help them get published. That isn't so in China. But overall it is the same. You can't change society with poetry.
Bei Dao
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing
articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.
Shirley Hazzard
#94. Every poet ... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
Thomas Carlyle
#95. It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's
concerns or the poet's truthfulness.
Seamus Heaney
#96. A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure.
Charlie Chaplin
#97. The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds - how many human aspirations are realized in their free, holiday-lives, and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!
John Burroughs
#98. A poet is simply an artist whose medium is human emotions. A poet chisels away at our own sensibilities, shaping our vision while molding our hearts. A poet wraps words around our own feelings and presents them as fresh gifts to humanity.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#99. 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
#100. 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
