Poet Quotes
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I was strong and tough enough and charming. / How else is a fat Jew lesbian poet gonna get by? / Listening to the radio, staying home, staying alone, like / they mean us to. / Who means you to be left out? / Who don't?
Elana Dykewomon
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America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.
Rebecca Harding Davis
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Like the minor poet who knows the meanness of his gift, I am doomed to a lifetime of frustration: to be able to comprehend beauty, but not create it.
Elizabeth Bear
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What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Some men are one thing on the surface and another underneath. The true poet shows not just the exterior of his subject, but all the contradictions within, and lets the reader draw his own conclusions.
Steven Saylor
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The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.
Paul Eluard
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A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so.
Eyvind Johnson
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Paul Valery speaks of the 'une ligne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself.
Stephen Spender
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The words are the mirror of a poet. Through which you can see the reflection of himself.
Gaurav Dagaonkar
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I can't believe there is a poet who hasn't eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It's part of the process of selection.
Stephen Dobyns
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Chloe turned to Vetch. The poet said gently, "You see, you do have power. Words give you power, to create or destroy." His eyes flickered to Clare. "Even to forgive.
Catherine Fisher
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God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven.
Honore de Balzac
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The poet lights the light and fades away. But the light goes on and on.
Emily Dickinson
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The passionate heart of the poet is whirled into folly and vice.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
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Most joyful let the Poet be, it is through him that all men see.
William Ellery Channing
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The most important American love poet in living memory, and certainly one of the most important American poets tout court, Robert Creeley was born in 1926 and raised in eastern Massachusetts.
Susan Stewart
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A poet and a doctor. Maybe I could. This the first thought I have of it. Maybe I could.
Elizabeth Wein
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Every poet is partly creator and partly the creature of circumstances.
George Gilfillan
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Poets can tell the truth as they see it. It’s the author’s story, the author’s voice.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.
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As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice.
Paul Auster
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I had to learn quick, because I was performing in Cinco de Mayo festivals with babies crying and people lifting their beers, and you know the feather dancers would come, and they'd say, "What are you, a poet? You're next".
Sandra Cisneros
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For five hundred years after Walther's death - until Goethe - no German lyric poet was his equal.
Walther von der Vogelweide
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When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.
John Drinkwater
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Technological prescience in science fiction usually requires an author with luck. Societal prescience requires a poet.
Heidi Hammel