Top 100 Poet Poet Quotes
#1. Virginia was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her lessons in algebra. Je m'imagine cela. They spent their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla. "Monsieur Poe-poe," as that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert's classes in Paris called the poet-poet.
Vladimir Nabokov
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. If I am not mistaken, it was a British poet who said that 'no one is properly dressed unless he wears a smile.'
Sukarno
#6. The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Robert Graves
#7. The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.
Miguel De Cervantes
#8. A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.
Cecil Day-Lewis
#9. The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#10. Tis a question whether adversity or prosperity makes the most poets.
George Farquhar
#11. When there is war, the poet lays down the lyre, the lawyer his law reports, the schoolboy his books.
Mahatma Gandhi
#12. The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's life ...
A.S. Byatt
#13. That is the best instruction you could ever give a poet: whether you're examining a bad line in a poem or a bad motive for action, keep well your repining - meaning, don't ignore the honest muttering in your head.
Alice Oswald
#14. 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
#15. I am a writer because I write, an author because I create, a poet because the words are in my soul.
Wesley D. Gray
#16. Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.
Eileen Myles
#17. People can't see that if I had not been a poet, I could never have had such success as a traveler.
Bayard Taylor
#18. I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.
William Butler Yeats
#19. 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
#20. I act as the tongue of you,
... tied in your mouth ... in mine it begins to be loosened.
Walt Whitman
#21. At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.
Seth Godin
#23. When a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was ... this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.
Orhan Pamuk
#24. If you rank me with the lyric poets, my exalted head shall strike the stars.
[Lat., Quod si me lyricis vatibus inseris,
Sublimi feriam sidera vertice.]
Horace
#25. 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
#26. The poet's spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth.
Salvatore Quasimodo
#27. brilliant and audacious as ever - a beat poet of paranoia. He
Jon Ronson
#28. 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
#29. That odd infallible sliding-like-crystal air on water that means day's left dawn for morning.
H.D.
#30. 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
#32. 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
#33. One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination. The Divine Vision.
William Blake
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. In fact, you could say that I became a poet by renouncing poetry.
Aime Cesaire
#37. The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.
John Ciardi
#38. Pretty much every artist in Scotland - musician, writer, poet, actor - they're all part of a thing called the National Collective.
Roddy Woomble
#40. Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge'they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.
Vissarion Belinsky
#41. You can't criticize Bob Dylan's singing. You have to respect Billy Joel as a brilliant poet. You can't tell me there's a better rock band ever than Led Zeppelin. And if you speak during the Eagles' "Last Resort," we're done. I'm just asking for seven minutes. This stuff really matters, you know.
Charlie Sheen
#42. [The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
Adrienne Rich
#43. He who creates three to five haiku poems during a lifetime is a haiku poet. He who attains to completes ten is a master.
Matsuo Basho
#44. A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#45. The poet is the man made to solve the riddle of the universe who brings the whole soul of man into activity.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#46. Who was a queen and loved a poet once
Humpbacked, a dwarf? ah, women can do that!
Robert Browning
#48. Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
Philip Larkin
#49. Reversed Thunder," as the poet George Herbert put it. "Reversed Thunder" -- the coming of judgement in response to the cry, "How long, O Lord?
Darrell Johnson
#50. Painters and poets have equal license in regard to everything.
Horace
#51. If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
Ben Lerner
#52. Feel no fear before the multitude of men, do not run in panic,
but let each man bear his shield straight toward the fore-fighters,
regarding his own life as hateful and holding the dark spirits of death as dear as the radiance of the sun.
Tyrtaeus
#53. 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
#54. I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act.
We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin.
-In the yellow time of pollen
Luke Davies
#55. The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.
Oscar Wilde
#56. A poet is someone who is abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement. Which is to say the highest form of concentration possible: fascination; to report on the electrifying experience of being
E. E. Cummings
#58. This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost everybody is a poet, but scarcely anyone can write a poem.
Clive James
#59. I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original.
William Cowper
#61. What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.
George Eliot
#62. As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.
Avijeet Das
#63. The words are the mirror of a poet. Through which you can see the reflection of himself.
Gaurav Dagaonkar
#64. Poets arent very usefulBecause they aren't consumeful or produceful..
Ogden Nash
#65. Every man is a poet when he is in love.
Plato
#66. Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.
Allen Tate
#67. RIMER, n. A poet regarded with indifference or disesteem.
Ambrose Bierce
#68. I get a huge energy transfusion from listening to poets read their works.
Grace Cavalieri
#70. Inscriptions here of various Names I view'd,
The greater part by hostile time subdu'd;
Yet wide was spread their fame in ages past,
And Poets once had promis'd they should last.
Alexander Pope
#71. The poet is he who can write some pure mythology today without the aid of posterity.
Henry David Thoreau
#72. A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.
Paul Valery
#74. 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
#75. Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?
J.G. Ballard
#76. The poet lives as long as his lines are imprinted on the minds of his readers.
Alan Bold
#77. Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#78. The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet's duty to hold the line.
Basil Bunting
#79. 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
#80. To be a poet is to have an appetite for a certain anxiety which, when tasted among the swirling sum of things existent or forfeit, causes, as the taste dies, joy.
Rene Char
#81. Making films is about having absolute and foolish confidence; the challenge for all of us is to have the heart of a poet and the skin of an elephant.
Mira Nair
#82. And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.
Peter Davison
#83. When Nature gives a gorgeous rose, Or yields the simplest fern, She writes this motto on the leaves, "To whom it may concern!" And so it is the poet comes And revels in her bowers, And, though another hold the land, Is owner of the flowers.
John Godfrey Saxe
#84. VALENTINE: Are you talking about Lord Byron, the poet?
BERNARD: No, you fucking idiot, we're talking about Lord Byron, the chartered accountant.
Tom Stoppard
#85. The poet made eating salad with your fingers seem to be the only natural and sensible thing to do.
Sylvia Plath
#86. But as poet Mizuta Masahide wrote, "Barn's burnt down / now / I can see the moon.
Brene Brown
#87. I think Wordsworth was as surprised to see me as I was him. It can't be usual to go to your favorite memory only to find someone already there, admiring the view ahead of you.
Jasper Fforde
#88. Your world is as big as you make it.
I know, for I used to abide
In the narrowest nest in a corner,
My wings pressing close to my side.
Georgia Douglas Johnson
#89. There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.
Charles Baudelaire
#90. Master Sigmund Freud once said that wherever I go, I find a poet has been there before me. This is simply because science either walks or runs but art has wings to fly!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#91. The twelfth-century poet Abraham ibn Ezra, whom you encountered in high school as Browning's Rabbi ben Ezra (may his tribe increase), limpidly described the shlimazl's lot when he wrote: If I sold lamps, The sun, In spite, Would shine at night.
Leo Rosten
#92. Every Artist's Decision; the line between selling, and selling out
Branch Isole
#93. The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone.
Edward Hirsch
#94. "Work" does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
Marshall McLuhan
#95. The poet has no greater number of muscles than the ordinary conversationalist; he merely has more highly developed muscles and better coordination. And he practises his activity according to a stricter set of rules.
Louis MacNeice
#96. I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.
Kenneth Koch
#97. Cities get built out of poet's dreams.
Marty Rubin
#98. When we did Cubist paintings, our intention was not to produce Cubist paintings but to express what was within us. No one laid down a course of action for us, and our friends the poets followed our endeavour attentively but they never dictated it to us.
Pablo Picasso
#100. 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
