Top 100 Quotes About Poet
#1. Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief.
Bono
#2. I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.
Norman Lock
#3. The wonderful 17th Century poet, Robert Herrick, wrote a poem entitled, 'To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses.' Easy to say, Robert Herrick; not always easy to do. But it's a good slogan, I think.
Robert Pinsky
#4. 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
#5. Our job is to become more and more of what we are. The growth of a poet seems to be related to his or her becoming less and less embarrassed about more and more.
Marvin Bell
#6. A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.
Douglas Dunn
#7. Screamin' 'Carpe Diem!' until I'm a Dead Poet.
Jay-Z
#8. Ultimately you're trying to reach across and find some other person, some other human warmth. But it is, especially in written poetry, it is inscribed in a text and the text can't do that work by itself and you as a poet can only do your best.
Edward Hirsch
#9. A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world.
Johann Gottfried Herder
#10. If I could write the beauty of your eyes And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, 'This poet lies; Such heavenly touches ne'er touch'd earthly faces.'
William Shakespeare
#11. When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.
Rhys Ifans
#12. 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
#13. For a young and presumptuous poet a disposition to write satires is one of the most dangerous he can encourage. It tempts him to personalities, which are not always forgiven after he has repented and become ashamed of them.
Robert Southey
#14. Forced relations between two things that superficially appear foreign create a new, instantaneous state. Authentic poetry asks nothing more. A kinship completely nonexistent moments ago was created by the poet's authority, just as it might have been created in life by the authority of chance.
Odysseus Elytis
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.
William Shakespeare
#18. Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.
Charles Baudelaire
#19. A poet is a musician who can't sing. Words have to find a man's mind before they can touch his heart, and some men's minds are woeful small targets.
Patrick Rothfuss
#20. 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
#21. If I am not mistaken, it was a British poet who said that 'no one is properly dressed unless he wears a smile.'
Sukarno
#22. A poet! I should have known you for a poet by how your body moved.
Patrick Rothfuss
#23. The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Robert Graves
#24. They are fools who kiss and tell'
Wisely has the poet sung.
Man may hold all sorts of posts
If he'll only hold his tongue.
Rudyard Kipling
#25. 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
#26. I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.
Nell Freudenberger
#27. 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
#28. A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.
Cecil Day-Lewis
#29. The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#30. I've made a lot of choices, some good, some not so good; how sad for those who merely hitchhike along, never daring to choose at all.
C.J. Heck
#31. With no companion but the constant Muse, Who sought me when I needed her ah, when Did I not need her, solitary else?
Richard Henry Stoddard
#32. Is encouragement what the poet needs? Open question. Maybe he needs discouragement. In fact, quite a few of them need more discouragement, the most discouragement possible.
Robert Fitzgerald
#33. 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
#34. Surely there is a knowing behind it all. There is a teacher, an expresser, a creator, an artist perhaps, a poet certainly that has designed and presented all of the clues that we need to navigate life with some degree of grace, and perhaps with a greater degree of happiness than we now have.
Jeffrey R. Anderson
#35. I have written a raucous valentine to a poet's dream and agony.
Ben Hecht
#36. I'm a poet who practices Zen. And it's not, I'm somebody who practices Zen who writes poetry. There's no separation for me.
Sam Hamill
#38. To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.
Lucille Clifton
#39. It's not that he doesn't appreciate beauty, he just appreciates it in his own way. I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany.
Terry Pratchett
#41. Tis a question whether adversity or prosperity makes the most poets.
George Farquhar
#42. Just enough angry, just enough indignant,
just enough the-world-will-never-know-how-ridiculously-awesome-I-am. Just enough poet.
Rainbow Rowell
#43. (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
#44. Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas.
Cynthia Ozick
#45. When there is war, the poet lays down the lyre, the lawyer his law reports, the schoolboy his books.
Mahatma Gandhi
#46. I am the poet, you are the poem; I hold the pen, you are the words, love is the ink, silence is the blank page.
Jenim Dibie
#47. 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
#48. You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.
Bob Dylan
#49. Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.
Carolyn Kizer
#50. Being a poet is not a job or a profession but a way of life.
Kathleen Raine
#51. An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad truth,
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,
And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#52. The poet, as a rule, is a half-man - a sissy, not a real person, and he is in no shape to lead real men in matters of blood, or courage.
Charles Bukowski
#53. Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.
Robert E. Howard
#54. I am a member of the Muskogee people. I'm a poet, a musician, a dreamer of sorts, a questioner. Like everyone else, I'm looking for answers of some sort or the other.
Joy Harjo
#55. 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
#56. It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road.
Donald Hall
#57. I guess you're right - I am a priest - I offer sacrifices - so take this line, I want you to have something of mine ...
John Geddes
#58. You called me poet-priest - I am ... devoted to my art, faithful to you ... or, is the other way around? ...
John Geddes
#59. It is the black poet who bridges the gap in tradition, who modifies tradition when experience demands it, who translates experience into meaning and meaning into belief.
Henry Louis Gates
#60. Moscow, Rome, London, Paris stay in place. Leningrad and New York float, spreading all their sails, cutting space with their prows, and can disappear, if not in reality, then in the imagination of the poet creating a myth, a mythical tradition on the grounds of his secret experience.
Nina Berberova
#62. Every poem can be considered in two ways
as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
C.S. Lewis
#63. I was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about!
Rita Dove
#64. You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.
Theophile Gautier
#65. 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
#66. I have neither the ability of a poet or the flourish of a dramatist. But I must admit I was floored
Tushar Raheja
#67. Heard ten thousand whispering and nobody listening. Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughing. Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter.
Bob Dylan
#68. A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.
Anna Brownell Jameson
#69. As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree'
probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.
Woody Allen
#72. I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.
Anne Stevenson
#74. She lends her pen,
to thoughts of him,
that flow from it,
in her solitary.
For she is his poet,
And he is her poetry.
Lang Leav
#75. Where even ravi (the sun) cannot reach, there will go a kavi (poet). - Vimalananda
Robert E. Svoboda
#76. If there ever was a poet for the working class Billy Joe Shaver and Merle Haggard would be my nomination.
David Allan Coe
#77. Women are very different to men, and that hasn't been respected. So when people say there's never been a good woman painter or poet or engineer or whatever, they don't understand that our skills are many simultaneously and men's skills are single.
Joanna Lumley
#78. 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
#79. I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.
Harold Bloom
#80. A poet must be a composer of plots rather than of verses,
Aristotle.
#81. I may as well tell you, here and now, that if you are going about the place thinking things pretty, you will never make a modern poet. Be poignant, man, be poignant!
P.G. Wodehouse
#83. The poet will maintain serenity in spite of all disappointments. He is expected to preserve an unconcerned and healthy outlook over the world, while he lives.
Henry David Thoreau
#84. We should give heed to what has been said by the heathen poet: "Do not yield to evils but proceed more boldly against them."15
Martin Luther
#85. Examine this statement: 'A woman cannot be a poet.' Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?
Jeanette Winterson
#86. I am a writer because I write, an author because I create, a poet because the words are in my soul.
Wesley D. Gray
#87. Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.
Eileen Myles
#88. One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes.
Donald Hall
#89. Art is eternally young, but the poet ages. If only he remained as young as art! If only it aged with him!
Franz Grillparzer
#90. He [the poet] brings out the inner part of things and presents them to men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets themselves.
Hilaire Belloc
#91. What a lover's heart knows let no man's brain dispute.
Aberjhani
#92. I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.
Margaret Atwood
#93. I think some period drama can be quite alienating, but 'Downton' isn't. This is going to sound quite, um, pretentious, but someone said that it's like a soap written by a poet.
Michelle Dockery
#94. I will be your poet, I will be more to you than to any of the rest.
Walt Whitman
#95. If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches
Rainer Maria Rilke
#96. People can't see that if I had not been a poet, I could never have had such success as a traveler.
Bayard Taylor
#97. In poetry, and in my study in graduate school, I was drawn to a particular poet, Theodore Roethke. I did a dissertation on "The Evolution of Matter and Spirit in the Poetry of Theodore Roethke" for my Ph.D.
Frederick Lenz
#98. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.
Charles Olson
#99. A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he candivide.
Franz Grillparzer
#100. The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton