Top 100 Quotes About A Great Poet
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Baudelaire was far more than a great poet. He established the keyboard of a sensibility that still lives within us, if we are not total brutes.
Roberto Calasso
#4. One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
Umberto Eco
#5. Lewis said sadly to me, 'When I at last realized that I was not, after all, going to be a great man...' I think he meant 'a great poet.
Jocelyn Gibb
#6. I always thought I was going to be a great poet, and go and live in New York, where the great poets lived - you know, where Whitman had walked the streets.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#7. It always has been and forever will be impossible for slavery or any kind or form of injustice to produce a great poet.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#8. Like a great poet, nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means. There are simply a sun, flowers, water, and love.
Heinrich Heine
#9. A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet ... yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.
Edgar Allan Poe
#10. A great poet does not express his or her self; he expresses all of our selves.
Gary Snyder
#11. A great poet must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an enemy upon the leaves that strew the forest, the touch of a blind man feeling the face of a darling child.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#12. I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.
Francois Mauriac
#13. To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language.
Octavio Paz
#15. There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#16. Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#17. But Racine's extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great psychologist.
Lytton Strachey
#18. No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet.
Claude Monet
#19. When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.
T. S. Eliot
#20. No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.
William Temple
#21. The void yields up nothing. You have to be a great poet to make it ring.
Jules Renard
#22. He was a great poet" They lamented.
No, he was not a great poet," said Theo, "He was a good poet, he could have been better. That's the real loss don't you see?
Lloyd Alexander
#23. Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.
Heinrich Heine
#24. I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.
Honore De Balzac
#25. A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#26. Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. - A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom on the seventh day of creation.
Lewis Cass
#27. Whatever is genuine in social relations endures, despite of time, error, absence, and destiny; and that which has no inherent vitality had better die at once. A great poet has truly declared that constancy is no virtue, but a fact.
Henry Theodore Tuckerman
#28. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.
Oscar Wilde
#29. When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship.
David Mitchell
#30. It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.
Clive James
#31. I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet.
Lord Chesterfield
#32. He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#33. Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.
Virginia Woolf
#34. A great poet can give nobler and more precious gifts to his country than the greatest philanthropist or politician.
Orna Ross
#35. You can't be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it.
Kenneth Koch
#36. A great poet can give wings to abstract thoughts that touch a reader's mind with the ecstasy of joy.
Debasish Mridha
#38. [Thanatopsis] was written in 1817, when Bryant was 23. Had he died then, the world would have thought it had lost a great poet. But he lived on.
William C. Bryant
#39. No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#40. One of the marks of a great poet is that he creates his own family of words and teaches them to live together in harmony and to help one another.
Gerald Brenan
#41. In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.
Kenneth Branagh
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.
Greil Marcus
#47. Writing a successful novel is a great challenge, and you have to be a bit of a poet, a bit of a critic, a bit of a dramatist, a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a social scientist, to pull it off.
Anis Shivani
#48. 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
#49. As the American poet, Marianne Moore, said: There is a great deal of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.
William Strunk Jr.
#50. A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered.
Lee Strasberg
#51. We used to play the underground clubs like the UFO, and Middle Earth, and they were great because they would have on things like a poet, string quartets, and then a rock band! It was kinda cool!
Alvin Lee
#52. The great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the mind.
Oscar Wilde
#53. 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
#54. It takes something of a poet to apprehend and get into the depth, the lusciousness, the spiritual life of a great poem. And so we must be in some way like God in order that we may see God as He is.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#55. I'd rather be a great bad poet than a good bad poet.
Ogden Nash
#56. I walk with Federico Garcia Lorca around the Upper West Side in Manhattan because that was a neighborhood he lived in and I imagine walking around Paris with Cesar Vallejo, a great Peruvian poet who lived in Paris. And I kind of create the walk as a kind of drama of my apprenticeship.
Edward Hirsch
#57. I'm from the beatnik generation, where everybody wanted to be a poet or writer or something. And at that time, I was a jazz critic, and I was always thinking, theorizing about what makes great art or what's important in art.
Harvey Pekar
#58. Bangladesh is a world of metaphor, of high and low theater, of great poetry and music. You talk to a rice farmer and you find a poet. You get to know a sweeper of the streets and you find a remarkable singer.
Jean Houston
#59. It is telling that the first recorded name in history belongs to an accountant, rather than a prophet, a poet or a great conqueror.1
Yuval Noah Harari
#60. Dante Alighieri is a universal poet, and great creators, they are writing for everybody always. Every single verse is very moving, and the beauty - if we don't understand, we just stay listening to the sound and it's like hearing music.
Roberto Benigni
#61. poet convinced both of his own talent and of the need to be self-indulgent in order to be a great artist.
Walter Isaacson
#62. The great poet is a great artist. He is painter and sculptor. The greatest pictures and statues have been painted and chiseled with words. They outlast all others.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#63. Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#64. The Church has lost a great religious poet in me; but I have lost an infinity of fun in the church, so the loss is even.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#65. The poet or the story-teller who cannot give the reader a little ghostly pleasure at times never can be either a really great writer or a great thinker.
Lafcadio Hearn
#66. Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spite of madness.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#67. [Abbas Kiarostami] is a great artist and a poet. I sometimes think that if Samuel Beckett made films, he'd make them like Kiarostami makes them.
Anthony Minghella
#68. Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist.
Steven Seagal
#69. The great post-Holocaust poet, Paul Celan, said that a poem is a message in a bottle sent out in the not always greatly hopeful belief that somewhere and some time it would wash up on land on heartland perhaps.
Edward Hirsch
#70. Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were "I go to seek a Great Perhaps." That's why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.
John Green
#71. Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.
John Drinkwater
#72. There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn't also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this.
Edward Hirsch
#73. A great ancient poet was blind. A great classical composer was deaf. Many of us are dumb. What have we to show for it?
Vera Nazarian
#74. Introducing someone as a "Negro poet with a University degree" or again, quite simply, the expression, "a great black poet." These ready-made phrases, which seem in a common-sense way to fill a need-or have a hidden subtlety, a permanent rub.
Frantz Fanon
#75. 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
#76. The elf nodded. From her saddlebow, she took a lute, a marvelous instrument of light, tastefully inlaid wood with a slender, engraved neck. Without a word, she handed the lute to Dandilion. The poet accepted the instrument and smiled. Also without a word, but his eyes said a great deal. "Farewell,
Andrzej Sapkowski
#77. Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.
Aravind Adiga
#78. I am a great admirer of Robert Vavra and love his beautiful photographs and books. He is a wonderful artist, a poet ...
Leni Riefenstahl
#79. The prose poem Walk The Red Road is great stuff and deserves to be read aloud. It compares quite favorably to The Walls Of Emerald by Li Chiang Yen, a Chinese poet of the late Tang period.
Brian Aldiss
#80. But I'm a woman, and as the great poet so cleverly wrote, hell
hath no fury as a woman scorned. Consider me your personal hell.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#81. Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it.
Salvador Dali
#82. Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet.
Anne Stevenson
#83. 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
#84. Walt Whitman is the only great modern poet who does not seem to experience discord when he faces his world. Not even solitude - his monologue is a universal chorus.
Octavio Paz
#85. There's nothing great Nor small, has said a poet of our day, Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eve And not be thrown out by the matin's bell.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#86. Frida. So after all, it is not for nothing that I was born a poet. For now she is going forth into the great wide world, that I once yearned so passionately to see. Little Frida sets out in a splendid covered sledge with silver bells on the harness -
Henrik Ibsen
#87. I'm from Chicago, so the Chicago working-class poets still mean a great deal to me.
Sandra Cisneros
#88. A comic writer should of all others be the least excused for deviating from nature, since it may not be always so easy for a serious poet to meet with the great and the admirable; but life every where furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous.
Henry Fielding
#89. It is a pity that no one in Paris bothered to quote Coleridge, who wrote, long before cubism, that the true poet is able to reduce 'succession to an instant.' Simultaneity in this sense is the property of all great poetry.
LeRoy C. Breunig
#90. 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
#91. Each young person is a poet of sorts, trying to sort out the poetics of their inner life and its relation to the great world around it. Each elder is a philosopher of sorts, trying to sort out the meanings and gleanings of a life as well as the necessary implications of the presence of death.
Michael Meade
#92. Housman is one of my heroes and always has been. He was a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but and absolutely marvellous minor poet, I think, and a great scholar.
A.E. Housman
#93. A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.
Mark Forsyth
#94. Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams, and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great; he is free from the experience of hostility; he is a poet, and most like an angel.
Leonard Bernstein
#95. A poet could write volumes about diners, because they're so beautiful. They're brightly lit, with chrome and booths and Naugahyde and great waitresses. Now, it might not be so great in the health department, but I think diner food is really worth experiencing periodically.
David Lynch
#96. It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.
George Bernard Shaw
#97. The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.
Albert Camus
#99. To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
#100. I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.
James Laughlin
