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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A poet's mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy.
Isak Dinesen
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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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If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.
William Butler Yeats
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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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I happen to believe that there are a lot of good poets around at present, but a poet like Alex Kuo, who possesses a highly developed moral sense and a bitter honesty, is rare at any time and especially in this time. We need him.
Carolyn Kizer
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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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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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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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Poets speak of hope in ladies smiles, but give me a smirk any day, I say.
Lois McMaster
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A poet not in love is out at sea; He must have a lay-figure.
Philip James Bailey
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Nas' longevity comes from him having strong lyrical value in his songs, him being more like a poet and improving over time.
Ernest Dion Wilson
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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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Just as we don't spend a lot of time worrying about how all those poets out there are going to monetize their poetry, the same is true for most bloggers.
Seth Godin
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With everyone born human, a poet - an artist - is born, who dies young and who is survived by an adult.
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
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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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Each poet creates an expatriate space, a slightly skewed domain where things are freshly felt because they are freshly said.
Alice Fulton
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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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It is surprising to see what superficial, inconsequential reasonings satisfy the most part of mankind. A piece of wit, a jest, a simile, or a quotation of an Author, passes for a mighty argument.... This weakness and effeminacy of mankind in being persuaded where they are delighted, have made them the sport of orators, poets, and men of wit.
John Arbuthnot
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I look at you and you look at me and deep in our hearts know it That you weren't much of a muse, but then I weren't much of a poet...
Nick Cave
The Birthday Party
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The poet I saw once...
but whose words have long been
in my mind, windows of invincible candles..
Nathalie Handal
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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
