Poet Quotes
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If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.
William Butler Yeats
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As playwrights, as poets, we have to look to ourselves, listen to our guts for the final answers about what changes to make. Everyone has advice about how to end your play differently. And it's not about right or wrong. At the end of the day, it's your baby and you know what's best.
Stephen Karam
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A poet can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory.
Edmund Morris
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Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper.
Miguel de Cervantes
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The true poet is called to take in the splendor of the world and for that reason will always be inclined to praise rather than tofind fault.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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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
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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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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.
William Faulkner
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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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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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I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of a man.
Walt Whitman
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The only advice [for new writers and poets] I can offer is to be yourself: not the self someone else wants you to be, but the self you are. Enjoy yourself and your life. But most of all travel and eat. That's how we learn.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.
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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.
Miguel de Cervantes
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I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.
Erica Jong
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And in a way, that's been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet - sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a while. This happens to everybody.
Norman MacCaig
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Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.
William E. Gladstone
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Does it mean this, does it mean that, that's all anybody wants to know. I'd say what any decent poet would say if anyone dared ask him to analyze his work: if you see it, darling, then it's there!
Freddie Mercury
Queen
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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.
Steven Heighton
