Poet Quotes
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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
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If a poet would work politically, he must give himself up to a party; and so soon as he does that, he is lost as a poet.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Romantic Art: The Hearts Awakening - Bouguereau At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.
Plato
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Academia is a graveyard of poets.
Kathleen Raine
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The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.
William Blake
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A poet, to whom no one cruel or imposing listens,
Disdained by senates, whispers to your dust.
Carolyn Kizer
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Yes, I am the first Latino poet laureate in the United States. But I'm also here for everyone and from everyone. My voice is made by everyone's voices.
Juan Felipe Herrera
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Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.
Allen Tate
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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
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There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I do believe that one's writing life needs to be kept separate from Po-Biz. Personally, I deal with this by not attending too many poetry readings, primarily reading dead poets or poems in translation, reading Poets & Writers only once for grant/contest information before I quickly dispose of it, and not reading Poetry Daily. Ever.
Cate Marvin
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The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
William James
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It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score.
Hector Hugh Munro
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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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Words like feminism or democracy scare me. They are words with barnacles on them, and you can't see what's underneath.
William Collins
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I'm a poet who can whine in meter
Sherman Alexie
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Poets speak of hope in ladies smiles, but give me a smirk any day, I say.
Lois McMaster
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He led quite a great life, ... He was an Old Testament figure railing against the establishment - a Jewish guy from New York who became a Buddhist, a poet, a musician.
Tom Hayden
