Poet Quotes

• Is T.S. Eliot the only poet one can think of who could have spent a year on his own in Paris at twenty-three—and managed to have no sexual encounter whatsoever?

  

  David Markson
  • Encounter
  • Sexual
  • Spent

• People can't see that if I had not been a poet, I could never have had such success as a traveler.

  

  Bayard Taylor
  • People
  • Success
  • Poet

• When I talk of hearing a poet's voice speaking, I always think of it as in the presence of the man.

  

  Norman MacCaig
  • Voice
  • Poet
  • Speaking

• It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.

  

  Sofia Kovalevskaya
  • Soul
  • Impossible
  • Mathematician

• Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

  

  Ernest Hemingway
  • Crazy
  • Madness
  • Pounds

• Jesus of Nazareth was a poet, no less than a prophet, of pre-eminent genius.

  

  Orson F. Whitney
  • Jesus
  • Genius
  • Poet

• Malcolm X is a person who has inspired - he has been the muse of several generations of black cultural workers, artists, poets, playwrights.

  

  Manning Marable
  • Black
  • Artist
  • Inspired

• "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
  • People
  • Attention
  • Dancer

• The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

  

  W. Somerset Maugham
  • Writer
  • Poet
  • Step

• According to them, the poet is confined to the provinces with his mouth broken on his own syllabic trapeze.

  

  Salvatore Quasimodo
  • Broken
  • Poet
  • Mouth

• Children when they ask you why your mama so funny say she is a poet she don't have no sense

  

  Lucille Clifton
  • Children
  • Why
  • She

• Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

  

  Sigmund Freud
  • Find
  • Poet

• A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

  

  Yevgeny Yevtushenko
  • Poetry
  • Poet
  • Anything

• There is nothing settled about a poet's identity. The becoming doesn't stop because the being has been achieved. They proceed together, attached in ways that are hard to be exact about.

  

  Eavan Boland
  • Together
  • Stop
  • Identity

• I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

  

  Tahar Ben Jelloun
  • Language
  • Poems
  • French

• A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.

  

  Salvatore Quasimodo
  • Poet
  • Own
  • Tradition

• A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

  

  W. H. Auden
  • Love
  • Person
  • Passionately

• Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

  

  Oscar Wilde
  • Present
  • Literature
  • Principle

• 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
  • Men
  • Imagination
  • Imagine

• 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
  • Work
  • Power
  • Knowledge

• See I'm a poet to some, a regular modern day Shakespeare.

  

  Eminem
  • Day
  • Poet
  • Modern

• the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.

  

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti
  • High
  • Climbs
  • Wire

• The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said "A civilization is judged only in its decline." That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players.

  

  Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.
  • Player
  • Imagine
  • Tennis

• If everybody became a poet the world would be much better. We would all read to each other.

  

  Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.
  • World
  • Poet

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