Poet Quotes
-
I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.
Honore de Balzac
-
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
-
What poet would not grieve to see
His brother write as well as he?
But rather than they should excel,
He'd wish his rivals all in Hell.
Jonathan Swift
-
For a man to become a poet, he must be in love, or miserable.
Lord Byron
-
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
-
A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.
Edgar Allan Poe
-
Those things which make the infernal regions terrible, the darkness, the prison, the river of flaming fire, the judgment seat, are all a fable, with which the poets amuse themselves, and by them agitate us with vain terrors.
Seneca the Younger
-
A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.
Rene Char
-
I'm inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I'm good at it.
Yasiin Bey
Black Star
-
“It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician.”
Karl Weierstrass
-
Superstition is the poesy of practical life; hence, a poet is none the worse for being superstitious.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
-
Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill.
J. D. McClatchy
-
They best can judge a poet's worth, Who oft themselves have known The pangs of a poetic birth By labours of their own.
William Cowper
-
And when you are foolish enough to identify yourself as a poet, your interlocutors will often ask: A PUBLISHED Poet? And when you tell them that you are, indeed, a published poet, they seem at least vaguely impressed. Why is that? Its not like they or anybody they know reads poetry journals. And yet there is something deeply right, I think, about this knee-jerk appeal to publicity. It's as if to say: Everybody can write a poem, but has your poetry, the distillation of your innermost being, been found authentic and intelligible by others? Can it circulate among persons, make of its readership, however small, a People in that sense? This accounts for the otherwise bafflingly persistent association of Poetry and fame - baffling since no poets are famous among the general population. To demand proof of fame is to demand proof that your songs made it back intact from the dream in the stable to the social world of the fire, that your song is at once utterly specific to you and exemplary for others.
Ben Lerner
-
I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet.
Sandra Cisneros
-
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
-
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
-
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
