Poet Quotes
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"You're next, after the feather dancers." And you had to get their attention, because otherwise people would go, "Oh, a poet." You really have to learn.
Sandra Cisneros
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I wrote poetry for seven or eight years, maybe longer, before I could say I was a poet. If people asked, I'd say I wrote poetry; I wouldn't go further. I was in my mid- to late-thirties before I felt that I was a poet, which I think meant that I had begun to embody my poems in some way. I wasn't just a writer of them. Hard to say what, as a poet, my place in the world is. Some place probably between recognition and neglect.
Stephen Dunn
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Jesus of Nazareth was a poet, no less than a prophet, of pre-eminent genius.
Orson F. Whitney
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To be a poet is to place pleasure, beauty and sensual delights front and centre, it means having a predilection for debauchery.
Nicole Brossard
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A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.
Salvatore Quasimodo
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Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.
Sigmund Freud
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If everybody became a poet the world would be much better. We would all read to each other.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.
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Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
Salvatore Quasimodo
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To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.
Lucille Clifton
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We're all getting older. We should, the three of us, be playing these songs because, hey, the end is always near. Morrison was a poet, and above all, a poet wants his words heard.
Ray Manzarek
The Doors
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The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.
Claude Levi-Strauss
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A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
Samuel McChord Crothers
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We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imagining of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck-half of us upside down-by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.
Richard Feynman
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There are poets who believe that you shouldn't engage at all in any cause. And there's something to be said for that. Because you don't want to - I think most political poetry is very bad. And it's very bad because you know too much to start with. You have a sense that you're right, and you're trying to tell other people what's right. And I think that's always kind of fundamentalism, and I don't like it.
W. S. Merwin
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Cynie Cory roams the outer reaches of the heart’s territory, from the snowy winter of family life to the tropical jungles of love. She wears her heart on her sleeve and it is as big as the country she writes about. Is she the quintessential American girl? You bet she is, part Annie Oakley, part Emily Dickinson – harpshooting poet of wild nights. She zooms in on the detritus of love – the broken fragments, the fallen leaves – and puts together a collage that is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful. Watch out – she’s driving down your street.
Barbara Hamby
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The violinist is that peculiarly human phenomenon distilled to a rare potency - half tiger, half poet.
Yehudi Menuhin
