Top 90 Quotes About Being A Poet
#1. Being a poet is not a job or a profession but a way of life.
Kathleen Raine
#2. (1)BEING A POET
is like opening a car door
& exposing yourself.
(2)BEING A GOOD POET
is like opening the door
& exposing the passenger
as well.
Chocolate Waters
#3. The attention one gets from being a poet isn't great.
Nick Flynn
#5. Part of the glamour of being a poet was always this long reach into the future. You knew you were managing time.
Eileen Myles
#6. My question is "when did other people give up the idea of being a poet?" You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?
William Stafford
#7. Being a poet, the advantages of dyslexia are many, affording me sensitivity to the musical nuances of language and the ability to juggle complicated ideas and narratives simultaneously.
Philip Schultz
#8. One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.
Billy Collins
#9. Being a poet one confronts the limitation of language, how can the spirit be revealed under any restrictions.
Mohit K. Misra
#10. A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.
Margaret Atwood
#11. Poetry never makes any money, and so there's no pressure to appeal to an audience. That makes a lot of things about being a poet difficult, but it also means freedom to write whatever you want to write, however you want to write it.
Garth Greenwell
#12. It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.
Philip Levine
#13. Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs
no regular hours, so many temptations!
Elizabeth Bishop
#14. There are rituals not structures for being a poet, drinking too much, taking too many drugs, being a lady chaser, having your nervous breakdown, being irresponsible about money.
Diane Wakoski
#16. 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
#17. It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.
Sofia Kovalevskaya
#18. I've been trying to come to terms with what I am and what I do and what I believe in. And I see that I'm not happy with - well, it's almost as if being a poet is not enough for me. It's too late for me to do more now. I did what I could in a small way. I did it as theater, too, to be honest.
Gerald Stern
#19. And once I knew a meditative rose That never raised its head from bowing down, Yet drew its inspiration from the stars. It bloomed and faded here beside the road, And, being a poet, wrote on empty air With fragrance all the beauty of its soul.
Henry Abbey
#20. Being a poet is like having an invisible partner. It isn't easy. But you can't live without it either. Talent is only 10 per cent. The rest is obsession.
Selima Hill
#21. 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
#22. It was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy.
Mary Karr
#23. It must be frustrating being a poet-or any sort of artist-and not being able to offend anyone any more.
Alexander McCall Smith
#24. 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
#25. A poet has to be a bit childlike at heart, and in that sense all the romantic stereotypes about poets being "eternal children", etc, are all accurate. They believe, whatever they may say, that art and words can change the world.
John Thomas Allen
#26. He is a prophet and not a poet and therefore his Koran is to be seen as a divine law and not as a book of a human being, made for education or entertainment.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#27. To become a poet, the most important thing is to pay attention. The next would probably be to read; it's so important to pay attention. It keeps you from being bored, and I might add it keeps you from being boorish.
Nikki Giovanni
#28. I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet.
Vladimir Nabokov
#29. I think that that's why artists make art - it is difficult to put into words unless you are a poet. What it takes is being open to the flow of universal creativity. The Zen artists knew this.
Alex Grey
#30. For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing.
Robin Morgan
#31. I've always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.
Justin Townes Earle
#32. Use anger to emotionalize whatever thing you intend to do in life - being a painter, a poet or a photographer
Gordon Parks
#33. My own journey in becoming a poet began with memory - with the need to record and hold on to what was being lost. One of my earliest poems, 'Give and Take,' was about my Aunt Sugar, how I was losing her to her memory loss.
Natasha Trethewey
#34. 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
#35. The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
Jean Cocteau
#36. A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.
Victor Hugo
#37. Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive.
Tennessee Williams
#38. The Best Thing I love about being a writer and a poet is, I can make up my own words to fit my imagination.
Ocean Crisstopher Poet
#39. Being engaged with life. One has to develop a poet's eye for perfect moments, moments that most people pass by.
Jewel
#40. If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.
Jean Cocteau
#41. I am an ordinary human being who is impelled to write poetry ... I still do feel that a poet has a duty to words, and that words can do wonderful things, and it's too bad to just let them lie there without doing anything with and for them.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#42. Would anyone but a crazed bicephalous being, half engineer, half poet, willingly shackle himself to a venture of such magnitude? I am prisoner of my dream.
Philippe Petit
#44. 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
#45. I do have a funny perception of mine I'd like to share. Being basically a lifetime poet. I've had many people say "I don't like poetry" But they'll listen to song after song that rhymes on the end in couplets Just a thought ...
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#46. [The poet] must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations, as a being superior to time and place.
Samuel Johnson
#47. I'm tired of being this solemn poet of the masses, the enigma shrouded in a mystery.
Michael Stipe
#48. An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses about the truths of the mind or of things.
Salvatore Quasimodo
#49. The interesting thing is that you don't often meet a poet who doesn't have a sense of humour, and some of them do keep it out of their poems because they're afraid of being seen as light versifiers.
Wendy Cope
#50. No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#51. Being identified as a poet in France or Denmark or India one is greeted with gracious respect.
James Broughton
#52. Of course, I have to consider that I've written a lot of prose, but I do in my heart think of myself as being originally, and still primarily, a poet.
Vikram Seth
#53. The Amorous Shepherd is a fruitless interlude, but those few poems are among the world's greatest love poems, because they're love poems about love, not about being poems. The poet loves because he loves, not because love exists.
Alvaro De Campos
#54. Being an artist is nothing, or at least, not enough; what you want is to be a poet.
Luc Delahaye
#55. Thousands of years ago, a Roman poet wrote, "I am a human being, therefore nothing human is foreign to me." I believe it to be true. So if this is possible for one human, it is possible for anyone. The path might be different, but the destination same.
Kamal Ravikant
#56. Superstition is the poesy of practical life; hence, a poet is none the worse for being superstitious.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#57. The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.
Nick Hornby
#58. Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
Thomas Aquinas
#59. You're a caring, thoughtful, considerate human being. Maybe that is a curse in this cold world we live in. You have the soul of a poet.
- Mrs. Bayfield, to David
Louis Sachar
#60. A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.
Frances Mayes
#61. If men will impartially, and not asquint, look toward the offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of any man's being a good poet without first being a good man.
Ben Jonson
#62. Technology will never rescue anyone from being a bad poet, but if you're good, it has the potential to do a lot of exciting things.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#63. A poet is a feeling, sentient being, not a word machine.
Marty Rubin
#64. Oh, if somewhere there were a being strong and handsome, a valiant heart, passionate and sensitive at once, a poet's spirit in an angel's form, a lyre with strings of steel, sounding sweet-sad epithalamiums to the heavens, then why should she not find that being?
Gustave Flaubert
#65. The power of painter or poet to describe what he calls an ideal thing depends upon its being to him not an ideal but a real thing. No man ever did or ever will work well but either from actual sight or sight of faith.
John Ruskin
#66. Imagine a twelve-year-old-girl.
Imagine her being attacked, raped and murdered.
Take your time.
Then imagine God.
M. Barin, poet
Hakan Nesser
#67. The force of originality "that made Donne so potent an influence in the seventeenth century makes him now at once for us, without his being the less felt as of his period, contemporary - obviously a living poet in the most important sense." In "The Good-Morrow" Leavis said that
John Donne
#68. To live within limits. To want one thing. Or a few things very much and love them dearly. Cling to them, survey them from every angle. Become one with them - that is what makes the poet, the artist, the human being.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#69. Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.
Robert Kroetsch
#70. 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
#71. I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.
Leslie Fiedler
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. You can judge the moral bearing of a political system, a political institution, a political man by the degree of danger they attach to the fact of being observed through the eyes of a satiric poet.
Roque Dalton
#76. It seemed almost inconceivable that in his short marriage to Althea she had, in her quiet way, left him feeling not only worthy, but exceptional, a man not only capable of being a real poet, but a husband and father too.
Andre Dubus III
#77. I don't like the stigma that comes with being called a poet ... So I call what I'm doing an improvisational adventure or an inebriational travelogue.
Tom Waits
#78. I wouldn't be happy about being considered a love poet or an environmental - I don't want any of those tags.
W.S. Merwin
#79. A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre; the realization of it, for destiny.
Joseph Brodsky
#80. For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature.
Octavio Paz
#81. I once tried hawking my own book around the pubs in the hope that, like the Salvation Army, I too could sell to the cerebrally relaxed. It was a disaster. I had beer thrown over me for being a) a nuisance, b) not as good as Wordsworth and c) a nancy for writing poetry in the first place.
Peter Finch
#82. How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they
John Keats
#83. 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
#84. Some want to be writers when life permits it. There is no part-time in being a writer. It's an all-in way of living your life through words and feelings scratched out with a pen.
Jason E. Hodges
#85. I didn't have a dream of being a press secretary, I had a dream of being a playwright; I had a dream of being a novelist and a poet.
Pearl Cleage
#86. It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!
Thom Gunn
#87. A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue, which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.
W. H. Auden
#88. 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
#89. Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet.
Rita Dove
#90. Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.
William Carlos Williams
