Poet Quotes
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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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One of my great surprises when I was in America was about twenty-five years ago in Harvard, hearing Randall Jarrell deliver a bitter attack on the way poets were neglected. Yet there were about two thousand people present, and he was being paid five hundred dollars for delivering this attack.
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Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.
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I'm a poet who can whine in meter
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For the godly poet must be chaste himself, but there is no need for his verses to be so.
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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.
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A poet can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory.
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Some moralist or mythological poet Compares the solitary soul to a swan; I am satisfied with that, Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it, Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.
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To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.
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Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.
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The ancient Britons lived and breathed in poetry: the expression may seem extravagant, but it is not so in reality; for, in their political maxims, preserved to our own times, they place the poet-musician beside the agriculturist and the artist, as one of the three pillars of social existence.
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It is not easy to describe the present position of legal opinion on advertising and free speech. Only a poet can capture the essence of chaos.
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The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.
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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.
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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!
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Lyrical poets have to be in touch with visceral experience. I've always tried to avoid virtual experiences. That's emerging in my fiction.
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It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind.
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It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.
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A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.
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To be a political poet means simply to be a poet, and any poet worth their salt will be a political animal in their own peculiar way - they have no choice: politics is one of the many fragments we thread into the tapestry of the poem.
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Through the ingenuousness of her age beamed an ardent mind, a mind not of the women but of the poet; she did not please, she intoxicated.
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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.
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The way to praise a poet is to write a poem.
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A poet is a good citizen turned inside out.
