Top 100 Quotes About Poet
#1. I do not want to be bored listening to music that is muffled and known only to the poet himself.
F. Sionil Jose
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of a man.
Walt Whitman
#5. How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, How does love suit with age, Sophocles, - are you still the man you were? Peace, he replied; most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master.
Plato
#6. Mab Jones' poetry is suffused with a cool wit and a wisdom beyond her years. She is a superb performance poet in the tradition of Joolz Denby and Pam Ayres and, like them, her work is beautifully layered and contains bittersweet depths.
Phill Jupitus
#8. Only the poet truly understands what is written between the pregnant pauses they create.
Shannon Lynette
#9. To paraphrase the great poet Dante, the heavens swirl above us and our eyes are still cast to the ground.
Vanna Bonta
#10. Once, I was a poet, and, like all poets, I spent too long in the Kingdom of Dreams.
Neil Gaiman
#11. God, she was beautiful - my first image of the Orient - a woman such as only the desert poet knew how to praise: her face was the sun, her hair the protecting shadow, her eyes fountains of cool water, her body the most slender of palm-trees and her smile a mirage.
Amin Maalouf
#12. What if this were Hell, this absence of sleep, this poet's desert, this pain of living, this dying of not dying, this anguish of shadows, this passion over death and light.
Leopold Sedar Senghor
#13. Hang yourself, poet, in your own words.
Otherwise, you are dead.
Langston Hughes
#14. Does this current deterioration and corruption of language, imprecision of thought, and so forth scare you - or is it just a decadent phase?
AUDEN
It terrifies me. I try by my personal example to fight it; as I say, it's a poet's role to maintain the sacredness of language.
W. H. Auden
#15. Theodore Roethke was a poet I was raised with so he has a lot of sentimental value for me.
Krist Novoselic
#16. These names mean nothing to Perowne. But he understands how eminent poets, like senior consultants, live in a watchful, jealous world in which reputations are edgily tended and a man can be brought low by status anxiety. Poets, or at least this poet, are as earthbound as the rest.
Ian McEwan
#17. Paint in blue and black ... sometimes gray - the colors of night - occasionally I surprise you with a mustard yellow, but then, I am a poet ...
John Geddes
#18. Just as the poet is a menace to conformity, he is also a constant threat to political dictators. He is always on the verge of blowing up the assembly line of political power.
Rollo May
#19. It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score.
Hector Hugh Munro
#20. Boy, you ain't a poet ...
just a drunk with a pen.
Hayes Carll
#21. What shall I say about poetry? What shall I say about those clouds, or about the sky? Look; look at them; look at it! And nothing more. Don't you understand anything about poetry? Leave that to the critics and the professors. For neither you, nor I, nor any poet knows what poetry is.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#22. Yet half the beast is the great god Pan, To laugh, as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man. The true gods sigh for the cost and the pain
For the reed that grows never more again As a reed with the reeds of the river.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#23. To become the love of a poet is to become both a muse and an immortal all at the same time.
Jennifer Megan Varnadore
#24. Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don't want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons.
Roman Payne
#25. You don't need to be a poet, a performer, a writer, or a journalist to tell your story powerfully. You do, however, need to elevate your language in ways that will bring your story to life clearly and imaginatively for others.
John Capecci And Timothy Cage
#27. A poet in my mind, needs to make a difference or his words don't mean a damn thing.
Jose Gouveia
#28. Knight seemed to weigh the precision of every word he used, careful as a poet. Even his handwritten letters had gone through at least one draft, he said, mostly to remove unnecessary insults. Only necessary ones remained.
Michael Finkel
#29. If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#30. 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
#31. Political poetry is more profoundly emotional than any other-at least as much as love poetry-and cannot be forced because then it becomes vulgar and unacceptable. It is necessary first to pan though all other poetry in order to become a political poet.
Pablo Neruda
#32. The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.
Henry David Thoreau
#33. The poet or storyteller who feels that he is competing with a superb double play in the World Series is a lost man. One would not want as a reader a man who did not appreciate the finesse of a double play.
John Cheever
#34. There were moments of despondency when Shakespeare thought himself no poet, and Raphael no painter; when the greatest wits have doubted the excellence of their happiest efforts.
Charles Caleb Colton
#35. Being an artist is nothing, or at least, not enough; what you want is to be a poet.
Luc Delahaye
#36. Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.
Howard Nemerov
#37. Decades from now, my grandchild is going to be a poet... And she's going to write about how she's a living testament to how her grandmother made love to hurricane and calmed the storm.
Danabelle Gutierrez
#38. In another life I would have liked to be a poet, I just can't stop the lines in time, so I'm a novelist.
Colum McCann
#39. The poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#40. I always was a rebel ... but on the other hand, I wanted to be loved and accepted ... and not just be a loudmouth, lunatic, poet, musician. But I cannot be what I am not.
John Lennon
#41. These pastoral-poet guys with their bleating goats and oaten pipes can stuff their phalaecean hendecasyllabics where the sun don't shine.
David Wishart
#44. So they're your favorite lines, then?" I press my lips to her forehead. "My dear baby blue. Both of those quotes are about you." I pause while she looks shocked. "Hey, see I'm a poet too.
Karina Halle
#45. The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the '60s: Independent fire!
Gwendolyn Brooks
#46. The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, 'A civilization is judged only in its decline.' That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players.
Nikki Giovanni
#47. As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#48. [About describing atomic models in the language of classical physics:]
We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.
Niels Bohr
#49. Poetry by its very nature is subversive ... It turns words inside out, confounds meaning, changes black and white to ambiguous shades of gray. Never trust a poet.
Cristina Garcia
#50. 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
#51. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
#52. All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!
Paul Klee
#53. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.
G.K. Chesterton
#54. I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.
Ben Okri
#55. In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.
Kenneth Branagh
#56. The experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#57. Every saint has a past, the sixteenth-century poet had said, and every sinner has a future.
Jan Karon
#58. There was a poor poet named Clough, Whom his friends all united to puff, But the public, though dull, Had not such a skull As belonged to believers in Clough.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
#59. Nothing higher can be accomplished by the epic poet thus interpreting his own time in order to serve the future.
(Foreword by Frederick Ungar in Elective Affinities, 1962, Ungar Publishing)
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#60. How sweetly she looks! O, but there's a wrinkle in her brow as deep as philosophy. - Anacreon, drink to my mistress' health, I'll pledge it. Stay, stay, there's a spider in the cup! No, 'tis but a grape-stone; swallow it, fear nothing, poet. So, so; lift higher.
Thomas Middleton
#61. In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.
Roberto Bolano
#62. Istanbul, a universal beauty where poet and archeologist, diplomat and merchant, princess and sailor, northerner and westerner screams with same admiration. The whole world thinks that this city is the most beautiful place on earth.
Edmondo De Amicis
#63. The fellow is either a madman or a poet.
Horace
#64. I'm really lucky in that I can do lots of different things. It must be really hard to just be a poet or just be a novelist - a constant cycle of effort and exhaustion and recuperation.
Mark Haddon
#65. You - and I'll venture every third writer in Europe nowadays - fancies himself a poet, when all you're doing is building little towers of words set prettily on a page.
Therese Anne Fowler
#66. I'm a poet,' the young man said, 'And it's my job to remember the sadness of things.
Clive Barker
#67. There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, mecum mea sunt cuncta: everything that is me is with me.
Anne Carson
#68. As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.
W. H. Auden
#69. It's that wounded-poet crap, that soul-pain shit, that too-much-of-a-tortured-genius-to-wash bollocks. Brush your teeth, you little bastard. You're not fucking Byron.
Robert Galbraith
#70. Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.
T. S. Eliot
#71. The attention one gets from being a poet isn't great.
Nick Flynn
#72. The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.
Jacques Maritain
#73. If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.
Jean Cocteau
#74. Yeats was the greatest poet of our times ... certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.
T. S. Eliot
#75. There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.
Jean Giraudoux
#76. I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
Howard Nemerov
#77. To a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.
Sharon Olds
#78. 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
#79. According to them, the poet is confined to the provinces with his mouth broken on his own syllabic trapeze.
Salvatore Quasimodo
#81. Filth and vermin though they shock the over-nice are imperfections of the flesh closely related in the just imagination of the poet to excessive cleanliness.
William Carlos Williams
#83. If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'
Philip Larkin
#84. Must not a poet hunt the unicorn through bush and bramble, through snow and fire, over desert and mountain, through thickets and over long barren roads even though he suspects sometimes that the unicorn does not exist- or exists only in his imagination?
May Sarton
#85. He remembers a verse from the mystic poet, Rumi, Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
J.J. Brown
#86. I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.
Louis MacNeice
#87. Love as a passion - it is our European specialty - must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#88. Or like a poet woo the Moon,
Riding an armchair for my steed,
And with a flashing pen harpoon
Terrific metaphors of speed.
Roy Campbell
#89. Poets and children," said Sylvan. "We are the same really. When you can't find a poet, find a child. Remember that.
Patricia MacLachlan
#91. One day, I will be a poet. Water will depend on my visions.
Mahmoud Darwish
#92. As English poet W.H. Auden put it in "Apropos of Many Things": "We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.
Richard Rohr
#93. Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.
Robert Lowell
#94. I really did think at one time that I was on the verge of becoming a poet, but Providence was kind enough to save me from that disaster.
Rabindranath Tagore
#96. I believe that the American poet ought to be a tough son of a bitch. He sought to hold his own in this culture on his own terms and not compromise under any circumstances.
James Dickey
#97. I believe that it is important for the artist, painter, poet, dancer, etc. to keep in mind that it is the art that drives the art world and not the other way around. Artists and other people of intelligence have the power to bring deeper content to our culture.
Thornton Willis
#98. A poet must discover that it's his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed.
Jim Harrison
#99. Now go. An actor should know when to leave the stage, a poet when the lay is finished, and a bard when it is time to put aside the lute.
Raymond E. Feist
#100. If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.
Countee Cullen
