Poet Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.
Stephen Sondheim
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A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.
Eugene Field
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Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.
Paul Muldoon
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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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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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But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.
Andrew Motion
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I know not that there is anything in nature more soothing to the mind than the contemplation of the moon, sailing, like some planetary bark, amidst a sea of bright azure. The subject is certainly hackneyed; the moon has been sung by poet and poetaster. Is there any marvel that it should be so?
William Gilmore Simms
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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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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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Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.
Stevie Smith
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Every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum ) and can never recur. That nothing shd. be old or borrowed however cannot be.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
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If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.
William Butler Yeats
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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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And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.
Virginia Woolf
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[To become a poet] The most important thing is to pay attention. The next would probably be to read; it's so important to pay attention. It keeps you from being bored, and I might add it keeps you from being boorish.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.
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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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With Ameen Rihani the matter is diametrically opposite to Alois Musil's Arabian Desert, in purpose, in point of view and, above all, in personal psychology... I have considerable admiration for Mr. Rihani as a writer, an authentic poet and a philosopher.
William Seabrook
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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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No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet.
Claude Monet
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It's a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a poet.
Thomas Carlyle
