Poet Quotes
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Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?
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Turn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but a poet; for a poet is worse, more servile, timorous and fawning than any I have named.
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The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.
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We are all youthful barbarians, and only our new toys bring us excitement. That has been the sole purpose of our flights. This one flies higher, that one faster. But now we will make ourselves at home. We will forget the machine, the tool. It is no longer complex; it does what it is supposed to do, unnoticed. And through this tool we will find again the old nature, the nature of the gardener, the navigator, the poet.
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All things can tempt me from this craft of verse: One time it was a woman's face, or worse-- The seeming needs of my fool-driven land; Now nothing but comes readier to the hand Than this accustomed toil.
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Being a poet is not a job or a profession but a way of life.
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Always in a foreign country, the poet uses poetry as an interpreter.
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Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.
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I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what's really on my mind.
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I was born with the devil in me,' Holmes wrote. 'I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.
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A poet is a good citizen turned inside out.
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The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
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Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief.
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I don't pretend to understand him, but I can enjoy him as a poet and comedian. I liked the idea of the eternal return. Sometimes I think that being on tour year after year is an eternal return; you play a certain club in Copenhagen and then ten years later you are back again, traveling the same roads year after year.
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And, of all lies (be that one poet's boast) / The lie that flatters I abhor the most.
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I have felt at times with groups of children that I was really being what every poet would like to be - a bard in the old sense.
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You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.
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If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.
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The nature of rumor is well known to all. It was your own poet who said: 'Rumor, an evil surpassing all evils in speed.'
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To my mind, it’s one of the deepest gratifications the poet or fiction writer knows. I mean, the internal stumbling upon some satisfactory answer to the question, What is this like? Or, What does this remind me of? A comparison is laboriously but successfully introduced. You meet your metaphor, and it’s good.
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From the throes of inspiration and the eddies of thought the poet may at last be able to arrive at, and convey the right admixture of words and meaning.
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A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.
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Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.
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The all importance of clothes has sprung up in the intellect of the dandy without effort, like an instinct of genius; he is inspired with clothes, a poet of clothes.
