Top 100 Poets Who Quotes
#1. We call those poets who are first to mark, Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn, Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark, While others only note that day is gone.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
#2. On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.
Michael Cunningham
#3. I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.
Marilyn Hacker
#4. I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.
Wislawa Szymborska
#5. Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
John Berger
#6. All poets who, when reading from their own works,m experience a choked feeling, are major. For that matter, all poets who read from their own works are major, whether they choke or not.
E.B. White
#7. I have a strange relationship with influences because mine are mostly literary or painters or poets, who I'll even quote. I don't do tributes to cinema.
Xavier Dolan
#8. He was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time.
James Baldwin
#9. I can't think offhand of any American poets who have Mandelstam's urgency, but it's a different country and a different time, and I don't think it would make much sense to say that this is something that's "missing" from contemporary American poetry.
Christian Wiman
#10. Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.
Wallace Stevens
#11. I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die.
Umberto Eco
#12. So, the process of revision, it's not systematic. But for me, I mean, I know a lot of poets who write out a draft and then revise it and I think they're happier people. But, I'm just not able to do it that way. I need to just continually examine it as I do it.
Edward Hirsch
#13. Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, 'was there ever dog that praised his fleas?
Richard Dawkins
#14. It is essential not only to the souls of painters and poets, who thrive in solitude, but to the rest of us, too
individuals whose canvas is our lives.
Sue Halpern
#15. I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.
Charles Olson
#16. There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
Eugenio Montale
#17. Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,
Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
And spaced by many years, each line an act
Through which few labor, which no men retract.
This passion is the scholar's heritage
Yvor Winters
#18. Speaking as an outsider is the most authentic voice for a poet. Poets who have one hundred thousand or one million readers [as many South Korean poets do] might not be a real, authentic poet.
Kim Hyesoon
#19. The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.
Antonio Machado
#20. Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to laya train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible!
Henry James
#21. I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself.
Diane Wakoski
#22. I am a romantic, in a literary way, by which I mean the Romantic poets, who thought just because a sensation is fleeting doesn't mean it isn't valuable. If the only criterion of value is whether something lasts, then the whole of human life is a waste of time.
Sebastian Faulks
#23. I thought, 'There are a lot of poets who have the courage to look into the abyss, but there are very few who have the courage to look happiness in the face and write about it,' which is what I wanted to be able to do.
Kenneth Koch
#24. When I mention somebody, that doesn't necessarily mean that I identify with him, personally or poetically. I'm extremely happy when I encounter poets who are different than I am. The ones who have their own distinct poetics provide me with the greatest experiences.
Wislawa Szymborska
#25. My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands.
Bob Dylan
#26. My advice to aspiring poets is to find a community of other poets who are willing to read one another's work. And to read widely, in a variety of time periods and cultures, to identify which traits of poems are appealing and which aversive. And what can be stolen.
Lucia Perillo
#27. I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.
James Laughlin
#28. I have seen so many poets who were famous, who won all sorts of prizes, disappear with their death. I write as good as I can and don't try to turn that into some hope for a future that I could never know.
Donald Hall
#29. She read books of poetry, though they had lately begun to stoke her fury. It was all very well for these poets, who wandered off to have adventures and then could string them to words, to music. Anything she might write would be formless, a creature of rage and stormcloud. No music there.
Ilana C. Myer
#30. Blessings be with them, and eternal praise, Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares!- The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays.
William Wordsworth
#31. Girls, there are poets who learn from you
to say, what you, in your aloneness, are;
and they learn through you to live distantness,
as the evenings through the great stars
become accustomed to eternity.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#32. On Memorial Day, I don't want to only remember the combatants. There were also those who came out of the trenches as writers and poets, who started preaching peace, men and women who have made this world a kinder place to live.
Eric Burdon
#33. Arthur Rimbaud was a disreputable, mean, ruthless, perverse, hateful wretch. He was also one of the greatest poets who ever lived.
Raymond Sokolov
#34. Only those of our poets who kept solidly to the Shakespearean tradition achieved any measure of success. But Keats was the last great exponent of that tradition, and we all know how thin, how lacking in charm, the copies of Keats have become.
Amy Lowell
#35. There's always some reason not to be writing and I regret the times I give in to that, because then writing feels strange - I feel like I have to reinvent the wheel. There are poets who don't have to do that.
Joan Larkin
#36. We know there are poets who are chosen: by what or whom, we no more know than what lies beyond our final breath, or what caused a certain action which resulted in the fulfillment or the desecration and collapse of what we most cared for in life.
Franz Wright
#37. Walt Whitman and Emerson are the poets who have given the world more than anyone else. Perhaps Whitman is not so widely read in England, but England never appreciates a poet until he is dead.
Oscar Wilde
#38. It's a thorny road for dreamers and poets who fantasize of majestic places and deep-seated desires of the heart that their hands may never hold.
Terry A. O'Neal
#39. I really have a distaste for poets who announce themselves at 50 yards; you know, here he comes, you know, with the beret and the cane and the cape and the whatever - whatever mishegas is part of the outfit there.
Billy Collins
#40. There are poets who sing you to sleep
and poets who ready you for war
and I want to be both.
Ashe Vernon
#41. There are many unspeakable words, forgotten, or forbidden.
Great thanks to the poets who make them all become reachable.
Toba Beta
#42. Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back.
Stephen Burt
#43. There is no peace to be taken
With poets who are young,
For they worry about the wars to be fought
and the songs that must be sung.
Joyce Kilmer
#44. The poets who do this are uniquely conscious of this silence, this stillness.
Russell Simmons
#45. Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?
Roland Barthes
#46. Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up to date in their chemical knowledge.
John B. S. Haldane
#47. The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.
Salvatore Quasimodo
#48. I am thinking of poets who haven't written well in years
but who rubbed against the sun twenty years ago
Aren't they in their own kinds of prisons too?
B.J. Ward
#49. The trouble with poetry is it's often written to the sound of a drum only the poet may hear; nonetheless, blessed are those poets who always manage to find unshakeable pleasure in their own works.
Criss Jami
#50. The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.
Billy Collins
#51. Sylvia Plath, Rumi, there's a lot of spoken word poets who do a really incredible job putting their spoken work into page poetry - that's what I strive to do.
Mary Lambert
#52. Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.
Edward Hirsch
#53. A stress on the system and I think a painful thing for many young poets who are looking to find a life in poetry that they're not going to be able to find.
Edward Hirsch
#54. Yes, it is wonderful to be alive! Indeed, the Bottle inwardly sang of all this, as do young poets, who frequently also know nothing about the things of which they sing. From The Bottle Neck
Hans Christian Andersen
#55. But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.
Robert Graves
#56. A local butcher offered me money to put in my next book a portrayal of a customer he didn't like that would make him ashamed to show his face in the town. It was like the tradition of the Gaelic poets, who were paid money to write in derision about people.
John McGahern
#57. In the Western tradition, the first writers were teachers and historians, vastly traveled, who spiced their reports with fantasies. They were also poets who sang and entertained prince and pauper.
F. Sionil Jose
#58. Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.
Ezra Pound
#59. There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.
Adrian Mitchell
#60. It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss betewen people in general and the artists. Or is it always so? The poets who are most ardently on the people's side write in such a way that the people cannot see rhyme nor reason to their work.
May Sarton
#61. When one would ask most modern artists, poets, writers and other status quo fueled semi-intellectuals who Machiavelli was - was that an opera singer?
Martijn Benders
#62. All over India policemen were arresting people, all opposition leaders except members of the pro-Moscow Communists, and also schoolteachers lawyers poets newspapermen trade-unionists, in fact anyone who had ever made the mistake of sneezing during the Madam's speeches,
Salman Rushdie
#63. As long as there are young people, and old people, too, who can imagine realities beyond seeing and touching, and as long as there are poets, and artists, and musicians, there will be unicorns.
Jack Clifford Smith
#64. A. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.
Cynthia Ozick
#66. I want to stay there. I don't want to go any further. I want to stay. I can't remember who it was - one of the poets, perhaps Tamundein - who said that all of our happiest hours must pass away at last, even those in which we believe we are unhappy.
Sofia Samatar
#67. As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry.
Simon Armitage
#68. Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
Nicholson Baker
#69. Because who hasn't tried to pull their arms from the sleeves of gravity's lead coat?
Who doesn't have at least one pair of wax wings out in the garage?
Lucia Perillo
#70. Writers, particularly poets, always feel exiled in some way - people who don't exactly feel at home, so they try to find a home in language.
Natasha Trethewey
#71. Poets and writers who are in love with the superlative all want to do more than they can.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#72. Poets talk about "spots of time," but it is really fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone.
Norman Maclean
#73. Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.
Robert Hass
#75. I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I also love more cerebral poets like H.D. and Emily Dickinson. My parents subscribed to a monthly poetry periodical, and as a teenager I was introduced to Denise Levertov, who was an influence.
Francesca Lia Block
#76. Drill in exact translation is an excellent way of disposing the mind against that looseness and exaggeration with which the sensationalists have corrupted our world. If schools of journalism knew their business, they would graduate no one who could not render the Greek poets.
Richard M. Weaver
#77. Rumi, who is one of the greatest Persian poets, said that the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf
#78. Everybody has their own idea of what's a poet. Robert Frost, President Johnson, T.S.Eliot, Rudolf Valentino - they're all poets. I like to think of myself as the one who carries the light bulb.
Bob Dylan
#80. Our earliest poets were shamans. Today, as in the earliest times, true shamans are poets of consciousness who know the power of song and story to teach and to heal.
Robert Moss
#81. Travellers, like poets, are mostly an angry race: by falling into a daily fit of passion, I proved to the governor and his son, who were profuse in their attentions, that I was in earnest.
Richard Francis Burton
#82. The 1960s was a period when writers in the West began to be aware of the extraordinary eloquence and popular attraction of the Russian poets such as Yevtushenko and Voznesensky - oppositional figures who could draw crowds. The Russian poets recited from memory as a matter of course.
James Fenton
#83. Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn't write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn't matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well.
Kurt Vonnegut
#84. The poet is much more the one who inspires,than the one who is inspired.
Paul Eluard
#85. If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.
Bruce Sterling
#86. Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.
Philip James Bailey
#87. Mandelstam is the sort of poet who comes along very, very rarely. Even the two Russian poets whose work is often linked with his - Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva - though their work is more "urgent" than most American poetry, seem to me to operate at a lesser charge than Mandelstam.
Christian Wiman
#88. Maybe I just didn't want it to be Benny because he really loves her, and if I was wrong about that, it'd be depressing. Who wants to be depressed?"
"Poets," Eve decided. "You have to think they must."
"Okay, other than poets.
J.D. Robb
#90. You admire, Vacerra, only the poets of old and praise only those who are dead. Pardon me, I beseech you, Vacerra, if I think death too high a price to pay for your praise.
Martial
#91. Eugenio Montale - born in Genoa in 1896, died in Milan, 1981 - is one of the twentieth-century Europeans who has spoken most meaningfully to American and British poets.
Jonathan Galassi
#92. Brilliant. [Lasdun] seems to me certainly among the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English, and far better than many who are more famous. His capacities are solidly established; his promise is nearly infinite.
Anthony Hecht
#93. How can you work on letting your thoughts go and getting synchronized into the moment and questioning your wild imagination. But I say just think of all the great Japanese and Chinese poets and scholars who were also meditators.
Anne Waldman
#94. There are dreamers and poets and landscape painters with dirty noses and wanderers like me who came here by chance and never left. They are all looking for something, travelling the world and the seven seas but looking for a reason to stay.
Jeanette Winterson
#95. A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of the spring, love, and dogs.
George Jean Nathan
#96. I knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house; but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments.
Lord Chesterfield
#97. Poets are simply those who have made a profession ans a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.
Joseph Campbell
#98. For even they who compose treatises of medicine or natural philosophy in verse are denominated Poets: yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except their metre; the former, therefore, justly merits the name of the Poet; while the other should rather be called a Physiologist than a Poet.
Aristotle.
#99. Whilst in Prussia poets only speak of the love of country as one of the dearest of all human affections, here there is no man who does not feel, and describe with rapture, how much he loves his country.
Karl Philipp Moritz
#100. The lovely daisy, so justly celebrated by European poets, is not a native of our soil; we know it well, however, by cultivation in our gardens and green houses; besides, we are disposed to remember it for the sake of those who have sung its praises in immortal verse.
Dorothea Dix
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