Poet Quotes
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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.
William Congreve
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The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.
Walt Whitman
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The only advice [for new writers and poets] I can offer is to be yourself: not the self someone else wants you to be, but the self you are. Enjoy yourself and your life. But most of all travel and eat. That's how we learn.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.
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To be a poet is to have an appetite for a certain anxiety which, when tasted among the swirling sum of things existent or forfeit, causes, as the taste dies, joy.
Rene Char
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A dreamer of the common dreams, A fisher in familiar streams, He chased the transitory gleams That all pursue; But on his lips the eternal themes Again were new.
William Watson
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I was born with the devil in me,' Holmes wrote. 'I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.
Erik Larson
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There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture — that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.
William Kingdon Clifford
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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
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Who, except the poets, reads poetry?
Babette Deutsch
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There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.
Ernest Hemingway
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Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper.
Miguel de Cervantes
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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
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I'm obviously not orthodox, I don't know how many real poets have ever been orthodox.
R. S. Thomas
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He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.
Tom Stoppard
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In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references!
Bart Ehrman
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The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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For the rhapsode ought to interpret the mind of the poet to his hearers, but how can he interpret him well unless he knows what he means?
Plato
