Poet Quotes

• Poets, like whores, are only hated by each other.

  

  William Wycherley
  • Poet
  • Hated

• There were a hundred booksellers in the old round city founded by the eighth-century caliph al-Mansur. The café and wine-drinking culture of Baghdad has been famous for centuries; there was a whole school of Iraqi poets who wrote poems about the wine bars of medieval Baghdad - the khamriyaat, or wine songs, that I quote in the book.

  

  Annia Ciezadlo
  • School
  • Book
  • Song

• When a writer becomes a reader of his or her own work, a lot can go wrong. It's like do-it-yourself dentistry.

  

  William Collins
  • English
  • Reader
  • Becomes

• I wouldn't be happy about being considered a love poet or an environmental - I don't want any of those tags.

  

  W. S. Merwin
  • Happy
  • Want
  • Tags

• I'm afraid I take ... this rather clinical view of love: it's saving you from madness. I'm not so enthusiastic as other poets have been.

  

  William Empson
  • Poetry
  • Literature
  • Madness

• For the poets tell us, don't they, that the melodies they bring us are gathered from rills that run with honey, out of glens and gardens of the Muses, and they bring them as bees do honey, flying like the bees? And what they say is true, for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him. So long as he has this in his possession, no man is able to make poetry or to chant in prophecy.

  

  Plato
  • Poet
  • Prophecy
  • Muses

• In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.

  

  William H. Gass
  • Thinking
  • Together
  • Talent

• You explain nothing, O poet, but thanks to you all things become explicable.

  

  Paul Claudel
  • Poet
  • Explain
  • Inexplicable

• I always was a rebel...but on the other hand, I wanted to be loved and accepted...and not just be a loudmouth, lunatic, poet, musician. But I cannot be what I am not.

  

  John Lennon The Beatles
  • Musician
  • Rebel
  • Lunatic

• The real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas.

  

  William Bernbach
  • Men
  • Real
  • Imagination

• Threadbare his songs seem now, to lettered ken: They were worn threadbare next the hearts of men.

  

  William Watson
  • Men
  • Heart
  • Song

• God, eldest of Poets.

  

  William Watson
  • Poet
  • Eldest

• I think humor is a very serious thing. I use it as a way of weakening the reader's defenses so that I can more easily take him to something more.

  

  William Collins
  • English
  • Humor
  • Humorous

• I'm now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a seer. You won't understand any of this, and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It's really not my fault.

  

  Arthur Rimbaud
  • Why
  • Strong
  • Suffering

• Who, except the poets, reads poetry?

  

  Babette Deutsch
  • Poetry
  • Poet

• In the streets the children screamed. The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed

  

  Don McLean
  • Children
  • Lovers
  • Streets

• A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.

  

  Ivan Turgenev
  • Poet
  • Phenomena
  • Psychologist

• What are we singers but the silver-voiced messengers of the poet and the musician?

  

  Nellie Melba
  • Art
  • Musician
  • Silver

• Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.

  

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti
  • High
  • Death
  • Audience

• The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.

  

  Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.
  • Writing
  • Book
  • Reader

• I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.

  

  Honore de Balzac
  • Feelings
  • Poet
  • Consist

• The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.

  

  Walt Whitman
  • Poet
  • Judges
  • Helpless

• When the poet died his cat was put to death and mummified.

  

  Petrarch
  • Cat
  • Poet
  • Died

• I have kind of an almost religious feeling about poets. I usually refuse to meet them because I admire them so much. Except for Poe.

  

  Tony Kushner
  • Feeling
  • Kind
  • Religious

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