Top 63 Quotes About Good Poets
#1. In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#2. Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
Nicholson Baker
#4. Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something - with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.
Louis MacNeice
#6. And as to experience-well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.
Elizabeth Bishop
#7. I happen to believe that there are a lot of good poets around at present, but a poet like Alex Kuo, who possesses a highly developed moral sense and a bitter honesty, is rare at any time and especially in this time. We need him.
Carolyn Kizer
#8. All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.
Umberto Eco
#9. I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
Umberto Eco
#10. Only good poets cure us of an overindulgence in words. Only simple essential food cures us of gluttony.
Hector Abad Faciolince
#11. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.
T. S. Eliot
#12. Has the painter not always gone to an art school, or at least to an established master, for instruction? And the composer, the sculptor, the architect? Then why not the writer? Good poets, like good hybrid corn, are both born and made.
Paul Engle
#13. NASA's next urgent mission should be to send good poets into space so they can describe what it's really like.
Dangerous by Shannon Hale
Shannon Hale
#14. All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual.
Helen Vendler
#15. The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.
Clifton Fadiman
#16. Remember that good poets too can write bad poems! Talent has also a talent to be untalented!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#17. 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
#19. Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.
Kenneth Koch
#20. My mother had to abandon her quest, but managed to extract from the restriction itself a further delicate thought, like good poets whom the tyranny of rhyme forces into the discovery of their finest lines.
Marcel Proust
#21. They say poets write mostly for themselves; if anyone else likes it, well and good, if not, it doesn't matter; certainly, not to me.
Tom Glazer
#22. I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.
James Laughlin
#23. The next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.
Annie Finch
#24. The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.
George Bernard Shaw
#25. Many are poets, but without the name;
For what is Poesy but to create
From overfeeling Good or Ill; and aim
At an external life beyond our fate,
And be the new Prometheus of new men,
Bestowing fire from Heaven, and then, too late,
Finding the pleasure given repaid with pain
George Gordon Byron
#27. We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground - for we have all been babies.
Mark Twain
#28. And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.
Norman MacCaig
#29. Good-bye to the lies of the poets.
[Lat., Valeant mendacia vatum.]
Ovid
#30. 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
#31. We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#32. All kids, when they go to school, are pretty good artists and dancers and singers and poets. All that gets buried, basically through being educated, or brainwashed.
William Wiley
#33. What I might do is watch Mrs Doubtfire. Or Dead Poets Society or Good Will Hunting and I might be nice to people, mindful today how fragile we all are, how delicate we are, even when fizzing with divine madness that seems like it will never expire.
Russell Brand
#35. There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.
Ernest Hemingway,
#36. Painters
and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!
Kurt Vonnegut
#37. Good or bad, positive or negative, there is no comment more insulting to a poet than one displaying that you have not properly read and considered the things they wrote.
Jasper Sole
#38. Good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.
Henry David Thoreau
#39. I'm inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I'm good at it.
Mos Def
#40. Defeat furnishes good material to the poets and the artists, but none of us care to have the glory of the conquered apply to us.
Susan Glaspell
#41. What poetry does above all else is develop sensibility. And that's what makes poetry so dangerous. That's why poetry is so good at undermining governments and so bad at building them. There's nothing harder to organize than a group of poets.
Sam Hamill
#42. Many poets, as you know, are not good readers.
Robert Giroux
#43. She was so intelligent that she could think herself into beauty. Intelligence ... they don't talk about it much, the poets, but when a woman is intelligent and passionate and good ...
Eva Ibbotson
#44. Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.
Henry Miller
#45. 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
#46. I agree that comedy does a good job - and is often about - stepping over the line - Lenny Bruce, etc. - and that this is important for a lot of poets too. I guess I feel like there has to be depth.
Rachel Zucker
#47. Poets knew that isolation in nature, far from people and things man-made, was good for the soul, and he'd always identified with poets.
Nicholas Sparks
#48. Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.
Sara Sheridan
#49. But the worst of it was, all the third-rate poets emerged unscathed; being third-rate, they didn't know good poetry from bad and consequently had no inkling of their crushing defeat.
Stanislaw Lem
#50. You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.
David Denby
#51. All good poems are victories over something.
Stephen Dunn
#52. Words are fossilized butterfly wings,
pretty to look at sometimes,
but only good for Museums.
I want to miserably burn down the Museums.
Jeremiah Walton
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost's poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along for good luck!
Robert Graves
#56. Let this then be one of our rules and principles concerning the gods, to which our poets and reciters will be expected to conform
that God is not the author of all things, but of good only.
Plato
#57. We may have an excellent ear for music, without being able to perform in any kind; we may judge well of poetry, without being poets, or possessing the least of a poetic vein; but we can have no tolerable notion of goodness without being tolerably good.
Anthony Ashley Cooper
#58. We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, We Poets of the proud old lineage Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest.
James Elroy Flecker
#59. I want to be one of those people, be they writers, poets, musicians, who leaves clues for the next generation. The really good people leave clues that help feed the human race. That's my aspiration.
Julian Casablancas
#60. Take time for good books; time to absorb the thoughts of poets and philosophers, seers and prophets.
Wilferd Peterson
#61. KISS, n. A word invented by the poets as a rhyme for "bliss." It is supposed to signify, in a general way, some kind of rite or ceremony appertaining to a good understanding; but the manner of its performance is unknown to this lexicographer.
Ambrose Bierce
#62. The public is probably more suspicious of poets than women, and maybe for good reason.
Billy Collins
#63. You know it already that each one of us is the effect of the infinite past; the child is ushered into the world not as something flashing from the hands of nature, as poets delight so much to depict, but he has the burden of an infinite past; for good or evil he comes to work out his own past deeds
Swami Vivekananda
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