Top 100 What Is A Poet Quotes
#1. Kierkegaard was once asked, 'What is a poet?' He answered that a poet was an unhappy man whose moans and cries of anguish were transformed into ravishing music.
Langdon Brown Gilkey
#2. What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.
Soren Kierkegaard
#3. What an ornament and safeguard is humor! Far better than wit for a poet and writer. It is a genius itself, and so defends from the insanities.
Walter Scott
#5. A poet is an artist that paints pictures by mixing thought, imagination, and emotion with words.
Debasish Mridha
#6. 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
#7. The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely.
John Drinkwater
#8. Frivolous Gossip and Poetry
It's just so much frivolous gossip to dwell upon the moral merits of a poet;
what should only concern the reader is the merit of his words.
Leave moral judgments to the preachers and aesthetic judgments to the critical readers.
Beryl Dov
#9. 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
#10. There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
Philip Larkin
#11. 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
#12. And the poet who fears to take the risk that what he writes may turn out not to be poetry at all, is a man who has surely failed, who ought to have adopted a less adventurous vocation
T. S. Eliot
#13. A poet is an unpaid laborer of a mine where he digs into the mountain to find rough diamonds. He then polishes them with his imagination and emotion to share with everyone.
Debasish Mridha
#14. The poet is like the wise fool or like a version of the stand-up, because we're standing, we're doing stand-up. That's exactly what we're doing.
Eileen Myles
#15. Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned.
Dana Gioia
#16. I think one of poetry's functions is not to give us what we want ... The poet isn't always of use to the tribe. The tribe thrives on the consensual. The tribe is pulling together to face the intruder who threatens it. Meanwhile, the poet is sitting by himself in the graveyard talking to a skull.
Heather McHugh
#17. 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
#18. I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized ... A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.
William Carlos Williams
#19. We cannot see the best things in life, we can only feel them. A poet tries to describe those indescribable feelings in a language of emotions and inner perceptions.
Debasish Mridha
#20. Knowing what / Thou knowest not / Is in a sense / Omniscience. -Piet Hein, poet and scientist (1905-1996)
Piet Hein
#21. Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.
Robert Frost
#22. Have big dreams but focus only on what you can control: your own thoughts, words and actions. This was Gandhi's way ... in the words of Buddhist poet Gary Snyder, our job is to move the world a millionth of an inch.
Eboo Patel
#23. Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no 'morality'. For what's 'morality' but a leash around the neck? A noose? What's 'morality' but what other people want you to do, for their own, selfish, unstated purposes?
Joyce Carol Oates
#24. No state sorrier than that of the man who keeps up a continual round, and pries into "the secrets of the nether world," as saith the poet, and is curious in conjecture of what is in his
neighbour's heart.
Marcus Aurelius
#26. I thought, 'There are a lot of poets who have the courage to look into the abyss, but there are very few who have the courage to look happiness in the face and write about it,' which is what I wanted to be able to do.
Kenneth Koch
#28. What does "poet laureate" mean? Nothing. It means a person with laurel branches twined around his head. Which is not something people do much now.
Nicholson Baker
#29. Nay, what is even worse, he may become a poet, which they say is an incurable and infectious disease." "This
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#30. As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that ... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.
Kenneth Koch
#31. I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.
James Laughlin
#32. This is really what you want? To live with a poet?" "Yes," she said. "With the hot plate? And the lice?
Joshua Ferris
#33. Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.
Oscar Wilde
#34. And what is the problem? It is the old problem of the anxious searcher - the mythic in the interior castle, the poet-pilgrim in a dark wood not sure how to proceed. Which way is the right way?
Paul Elie
#35. The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.
Franz Grillparzer
#36. The poet is a creator, not an iconoclast, and never will tamely endeavor to say in prose what can only be expressed in song.
Edmund Clarence Stedman
#37. What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.
T. S. Eliot
#38. What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.
August Wilhelm Von Schlegel
#39. I'm really clear about what my life mission is now. There's no more depression or lethargy, and I feel like I've returned to the athlete I once was. I'm integrating all the parts of me - jock, musician, writer, poet, philosopher - and becoming stronger as a result.
Alanis Morissette
#40. Poetry is another name for a person's telling of the self, existence and what is beyond, and one's own perceptions.
M. Fethullah Gulen
#41. For a poet reality is mysterious, imaginations are magical, and perceptions are magnificent.
Debasish Mridha
#43. Do what you will, this life's a fiction, And it is made up of contradiction.
William Blake
#44. As a poet Maria Terrone lives, like the rest of us, in a world of questions marks-but what shines through them is the fierce light of the life force itself
Eamon Grennan
#45. What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
Barbara Kingsolver
#46. A poet does not see or hear or feel things that others do not see or hear or feel. What makes a person a poet is the ability to recall what she has felt and seen and heard. And to relive it and describe it in such a way that others can then see and feel and hear again what they may have missed.
William Wordsworth
#47. The poet Rumi said that "the price of kissing is your life." He was right, and he was offering us a carrot. What he did not mention is the stick: that the price of not kissing is your miserable unkissed life.
Anne Benvenuti
#48. My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
John Lennon
#49. Did the gods once mingle with humankind, or is Homer a visionary madman, or, what is worse, a mere poet, a maker-up of beautiful falsities, an elegant liar? I shall grapple with that perplexity, only to emerge as I went in, in a cloud of unknowing, if perhaps a little the wiser.
Eva Brann
#50. People think, 'Oh my goodness! I have to do something really big.' You don't. Do what you love. There's a great quote from a poet I use all the time: 'Instead of asking what the world needs, ask yourself what you love,' because what the world needs is more people doing what they love.
Maria Shriver
#51. The relation between a poet and audience is really insignificant. What matters is the poet is hearing something that he is broadcasting. And whether there is anybody with a receiver isn't the reason he does it. He hopes there is somebody receiving it.
Peter Davison
#52. Pure poetry in motion. A swift-moving, heartfelt tale of love and loss, two stories intersecting-an d connecting-by magic. Michelle Baker is a born poet, and a born writer. The Canoe is just the start of what I hope to be a long idyllic journey through the love and soul of the human heart.
Trent Zelazny
#53. The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.
Margaret Atwood
#54. What is needed is the imagination of the poet and the reasoning power of the mathematician. The thief of "The Purloined Letter" successfully hides the letter from the police because he is both a poet and a mathematician. Dupin is able to find it because he too meets both conditions.
Vincent Buranelli
#55. A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion.
Debasish Mridha
#56. The thing that fiction can do is look from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Even memoir leaves me somewhat frustrated. I think now we need a poet to uncover what isn't on the surface.
Alice McDermott
#57. They say, poetry is dead. I say, was there ever a time they had a clue of what the state of poetry is?
Jason E. Hodges
#58. What is lawful, what is unlawful?" asked Ku Yuan, prince and poet of Chu. "This country is a slough of despond! Nothing is pure any longer! Informers are exalted! And wise men of gentle birth are without renown!"3
Karen Armstrong
#59. A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably ... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.
Aristotle.
#60. 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
#61. Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?
William Stafford
#62. What is a modern poet's fate? / To write his thoughts upon a slate; / The critic spits on what is done, / Gives it a wipe - and all is gone.
Thomas Hood
#63. The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.
Edward Hirsch
#64. Poetry is an art of telling the poet's own truth my bending and twisting it with his or her own emotional bulldozer.
Debasish Mridha
#65. The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.
Dan Simmons
#66. The revolt of the poet is invariably conservative at its roots. ... Not politically conservative, but imaginatively conservative, with a profound regard for what is given, as earth or air, sun or moon or stars, or the dreams of man.
Cid Corman
#67. A poet sees a flower and can go on and on about how beautiful the colors are. But what the poet doesn't see is the xylem and the phloem and the pollen and the thousands of generations of breeding and the billions of years before that. All of that is only available to the scientists.
George M. Church
#68. The poet, like the lover, is a person unable to reconcile what he knows with what he feels. His peculiarity is that he is under a certain compulsion to do so.
Babette Deutsch
#69. But maybe it's up in the hills under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is always only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.
Paul Engle
#70. 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
#71. In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.
Ray Bradbury
#72. What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.
George Eliot
#73. But it's your Oracle," I protested. "Can't you tell us what the prophecy means?"
Apollo sighed. "You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear through the search.
Rick Riordan
#74. From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.
Diane Wakoski
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind him too; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather more strictly compelling.
Lascelles Abercrombie
#78. The logic of the poet - that is, the logic of language or the experience itself - develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.
Thomas Merton
#79. Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.
James Laughlin
#80. Campion is a poet who knows that what a poet sees is nothing without a mixture of formal prowess and emotional insight.
David Biespiel
#81. The Japanese poet Masahide once wrote,"The barn has burnt down - now I can see the moon." I now understand what that means. Life can truly begin after a fire when all is seemingly lost. All of the unnecessary has been burned away.
Kenn Bivins
#82. Black is not sad. Bright colors are what depresses me. They're so ... empty. Black is poetic. How do you imagine a poet? In a bright yellow jacket? Probably not.
Ann Demeulemeester
#83. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be
Abraham H. Maslow
#84. You're not a secretary; you're a poet. What makes you think your life is going to be uncomplicated? What makes you think you can avoid all conflict? What makes you think you can avoid pain? Or passion? There's something to be said for passion. Can't you ever allow yourself and forgive yourself?
Erica Jong
#85. The scarily brilliant Romantic poet and visionary William Blake dared to say what many of us have perhaps thought but kept to ourselves: A good local pub has much in common with a church, except that a pub is warmer, and there's more conversation.
Brian D. McLaren
#86. Oh let me live my own! and die so too!
("To live and die is all I have to do:")
Maintain a poet's dignity and ease,
And see what friends, and read what books I please.
Alexander Pope
#88. As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
T. S. Eliot
#89. He was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then.
Thomas Hardy
#90. But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.
Beth Henley
#92. Rick Black writes with the honed elegance of a poet so in command of lyric sentiment and the efficient evocative use of language that what results is indeed as urgent and vulnerable as true prayer ... There is something profoundly human and completely necessary about Star of David.
Kwame Dawes
#93. Nothing is more wretched than a man who traverses everything in a round, and pries into things beneath the earth, as the poet says, and seeks by conjecture what is in the minds of his neighbours, without perceiving that it is sufficient to attend to the daemon within him,
Various
#94. Golf is to me what his Sabine farm was to the poet Horace - a solace and an inspiration.
Ramsay MacDonald
#95. The poet must work with brush and paper,but this is not what makes the poem. A man does not go in search of a poem - the poem comes in search of him.
Yang Wanli
#96. Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
Wallace Stevens
#97. I am a lover of love and I am a lover of words, and the two together spin visions of airy castles, but also may pierce the heart of hope. And so I remind you that I am a fool, a poet, and what matters is reality, not lovely words. Words are full of promise, yet empty of matter.
Waylon H. Lewis
#98. You are a poem--and that is to be the best part of a poet--what makes up the
poet's consciousness in his best moods.
George Eliot
#99. He invades authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in other poets is only victory in him.
John Dryden
#100. To practice your scales, so to speak, in order play the symphony, is what you have to do as a young poet.
Rita Dove
