Poet Quotes
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Bob Altman got nothing from the TV series 'M*A*S*H,' and the royalties for the theme song went to his oldest son, Michael, who wrote it as a 15-year-old poet!
Mitchell Zuckoff
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Tell me", he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how to speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depth of the sea instead?
Virginia Woolf
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Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.
William Shenstone
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All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.
Stevie Smith
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Always in a foreign country, the poet uses poetry as an interpreter.
Edmond Jabes
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She was not a poet. She was a poem.
Deborah Levy
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Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.
Virginia Woolf
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Beneath the stars the lake lay dark and sombre," Stead wrote, "but on its shores gleamed and glowed in golden radiance the ivory city, beautiful as a poet's dream, silent as a city of the dead.
Erik Larson
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It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness.
Seamus Heaney
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I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.
William Butler Yeats
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I thought of rhyme alone,
For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble
And make the daylight sweet once more.
William Butler Yeats
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There is a pleasure in poetic pains / Which only poets know.
William Cowper
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Anybody who instantly goes from being a poet and a graduate student to being a public figure has to be in a state of shock. First people want to praise you, and then they want to attack you. No one can prepare you for it.
Erica Jong
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I would rather be a swineherd, understood by the swine, than a poet misunderstood by men.
Soren Kierkegaard
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In some ways painters have been more important in my life than writers. Painters teach you how to see—a faculty that usually isn’t highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing.
Carolyn Kizer
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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.
Northrop Frye
