Poet Quotes
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Poets, like whores, are only hated by each other.
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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.
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Don't ask a poet to explain himself. He cannot.
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A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.
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God, eldest of Poets.
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If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.
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“It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician.”
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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.
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The poet is never inspired, because he is the master of that which appears to others as inspiration. He does not wait for inspiration to fall out of the heavens like roasted ortolans. He knows how to hunt...He is never inspired because he is unceasingly inspired, because the powers of poetry are always at his disposition, subjected to his will, submissive to his own activity.
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A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.
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A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.
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My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.
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The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
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As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.
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Turn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but a poet; for a poet is worse, more servile, timorous and fawning than any I have named.
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I'm obviously not orthodox, I don't know how many real poets have ever been orthodox.
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A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.
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Screamin' 'Carpe Diem!' until I'm a Dead Poet.
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A lot of artists use memories. A lot of prose writers, a lot of poets, a lot of songwriters, refer back to something. Generally it's all you've got, unless you're brilliant and can write totally in the now.
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I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.
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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.
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Black poet extraordinaire Langston Hughes provided a nuts-and-bolts blueprint in “Good Morning, Revolution,” 1934
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I don't pretend to understand him, but I can enjoy him as a poet and comedian. I liked the idea of the eternal return. Sometimes I think that being on tour year after year is an eternal return; you play a certain club in Copenhagen and then ten years later you are back again, traveling the same roads year after year.
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Im not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.
