Poet Quotes
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I dream of a collaboration that will become so complete that, often, the poet will think as musician and the musician as poet, so that the work resulting from this union will not be the random conclusion of a series of approximations and concessions, but the harmonious synthesis of two aspects of the same thought.
Arthur Honegger
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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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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
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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
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My dad wanted to name me after Rainier Maria Rilke, the poet.
Rainn Wilson
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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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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
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The poet is he who fights on the passionate Side and whoever loses he wins; when he Is defeated it is hard to say who wins...
Allen Tate
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I have no connections here; only gusty collisions, rootless seedlings forced into bloom, that collapse. ... I am the Visiting Poet: a real unicorn, a wind-up plush dodo, a wax museum of the Movement. People want to push the buttons and see me glow.
Marge Piercy
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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. Auden
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A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.
C. Day Lewis
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The engineers of the future will be poets.
Terence McKenna
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Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry
William Empson
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People can't see that if I had not been a poet, I could never have had such success as a traveler.
Bayard Taylor
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I always have a backpack. I was a poet, so it reminds me of being a backpack poet.
Omari Hardwick
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So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.
Allen Tate
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The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.
Eugene Ionesco
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We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.
E. M. Forster