Top 100 The Poet Quotes
#1. Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief.
Bono
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.
Charles Baudelaire
#15. The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Robert Graves
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.
Lucille Clifton
#26. Tis a question whether adversity or prosperity makes the most poets.
George Farquhar
#27. Just enough angry, just enough indignant,
just enough the-world-will-never-know-how-ridiculously-awesome-I-am. Just enough poet.
Rainbow Rowell
#28. (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
#29. Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas.
Cynthia Ozick
#30. When there is war, the poet lays down the lyre, the lawyer his law reports, the schoolboy his books.
Mahatma Gandhi
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. You called me poet-priest - I am ... devoted to my art, faithful to you ... or, is the other way around? ...
John Geddes
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. I have neither the ability of a poet or the flourish of a dramatist. But I must admit I was floored
Tushar Raheja
#46. 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
#47. 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
#50. Where even ravi (the sun) cannot reach, there will go a kavi (poet). - Vimalananda
Robert E. Svoboda
#51. If there ever was a poet for the working class Billy Joe Shaver and Merle Haggard would be my nomination.
David Allan Coe
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. I am a writer because I write, an author because I create, a poet because the words are in my soul.
Wesley D. Gray
#57. Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.
Eileen Myles
#58. Art is eternally young, but the poet ages. If only he remained as young as art! If only it aged with him!
Franz Grillparzer
#59. 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
#60. I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.
Margaret Atwood
#61. I will be your poet, I will be more to you than to any of the rest.
Walt Whitman
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter - or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then.
Jonathan Galassi
#68. Today we should make poems including iron and steel And the poet should know how to lead an attack.
Ho Chi Minh
#69. Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.
Honore De Balzac
#70. Eggs I must instantly have!" she announced. "And Lope de Vega I will not have, though in general a fine poet, but not in the kitchen!
Georgette Heyer
#71. A man was leaning idly against an elm ... The man, who towered over the poet even at his slanting angle, too old for a student and too worn for a faculty member, stared at him with the familiar, insatiable gleam of the literary admirer.
Matthew Pearl
#72. Both the poet and scholar are trying to learn something. The poem for me is a pursuit. Some of the answers are within. Some of the answers are without.
Gregory Pardlo
#73. Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. - It is not fair. - He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. - I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it - but fear I must.
Jane Austen
#74. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#75. Every dad who loves his daughter is not going to want her to go with the penniless slacker loser poet bum, when she could go out with someone who's successful.
John Leguizamo
#76. I mean the most important thing you can have as an actor, writer, director, or whatever you are, poet or whatever it is, is life experience. Life experience doesn't mean you have to live 50 years to have it. I mean you know a lot of people have huge life experience by the time they're in college.
Billy Bob Thornton
#77. And when her biographer says of an Italian woman poet, 'during some years her Muse was intermitted,' we do not wonder at the fact when he casually mentions her ten children.
Anna Garlin Spencer
#78. A poet is a silent singer; he sings the deep songs of the soul silently.
Debasish Mridha
#79. The end of spring- the poet is brooding about editors.
Yosa Buson
#80. I act as the tongue of you,
... tied in your mouth ... in mine it begins to be loosened.
Walt Whitman
#81. I think of New York City lost in stars
forgotten as a blue haired pet of childhood love
Tonight the night is full;
Gregory Corso
#82. At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.
Seth Godin
#83. Out of the ruined lodge and forgotten mansion, bowers that are trodden under foot, and pleasure-houses that are dust, the poet calls up a palingenesis.
Thomas De Quincey
#84. The poet has an obligation to dissect his own corpse and reveal the symptoms of its illness to the world.
Soseki Natsume
#86. The poet is he who fights on the passionate
Side and whoever loses he wins; when he
Is defeated it is hard to say who wins ...
Allen Tate
#87. The surname Messi comes from the Italian town of Porto Recanati, in the province of Macerata, which saw the birth of the poet Giacomo Leopardi and the tenor Beniamino Gigli.
Luca Caioli
#88. 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
#89. If you rank me with the lyric poets, my exalted head shall strike the stars.
[Lat., Quod si me lyricis vatibus inseris,
Sublimi feriam sidera vertice.]
Horace
#90. The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him.
Henry David Thoreau
#91. Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor ... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.
R.S. Thomas
#92. But you have to understand that I consider myself a very modest artist, or whatever, and not of importance really at all - it is quite embarrassing to me to be asked my opinion about things. I am only a wee Scottish poet on the outside of everything.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
#93. "Look into thy heart and write!" is good advice, but not if interpreted to mean, "Look nowhere else!" The poet should know his world and, so far as his art is concerned, any kind of battering from his world is better than his own self-indulgent brooding.
Harriet Monroe
#94. The poet's spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth.
Salvatore Quasimodo
#95. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no identity-he is continually infirming and filling some other body.
John Keats
#97. Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.
'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem.
Karen Tei Yamashita
#98. The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.
G.H. Hardy
#99. I shall try to write a poem that is about the moment but doesn't betray things that are true to me as a poet.
Andrew Motion
#100. Don't be afraid," he said. "Art is full of agony and beauty. The pen itself a sword of pleasure and pain, isn't it, my poet?
Lisa Carlisle
