Best 1314 quotes in «poet quotes» category

James McMurtry is a true Americana poet - actually he is a poet regardless of genre

Jean Valentine and Jane Cooper were my professors at Sarah Lawrence College - and they were uncompromised in their art. They gave me models of how to live one's life as a poet.

Keelhaul the poets in the vestry chairs.

Katherine Sedley was the only daughter and heiress to the libertine poet Sir Charles Sedley, and grew into a thoroughly scandalous lady in her own right.

[Kenneth Koch] taught us to be playful, to be very appreciative of other poets, to appreciate all forms of expression. He taught us to be experimental.

Know that there is often hidden in us a dormant poet, always young and alive.

Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation.

Latino poets, are really having a significant impact on American poetics today.

Lesbians are the poets of the humanity of women.

Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.

Let the poets cry themselves to sleep, and all their tearful words will turn back into steam.

Like the minor poet who knows the meanness of his gift, I am doomed to a lifetime of frustration: to be able to comprehend beauty, but not create it.

Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.

Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as soon as he reflects he is a child.

Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.

Love is not fashionable anymore; the poets have killed it.

Love isn't soft, like the poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close.

love wasn't the soft, silky words the poets spoke of. Love,with it's twin edges, was the one factor that weakened so many women, that pushed them to compromised their own wants, their own needs for the needs and wants of another.

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.

Mandelstam is the sort of poet who comes along very, very rarely. Even the two Russian poets whose work is often linked with his - Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva - though their work is more "urgent" than most American poetry, seem to me to operate at a lesser charge than Mandelstam.

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

Man is made to create, from the poet to the potter.

Maybe the poets are right. Maybe love is the only answer.

Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.

Maybe lurking in my unconscious was the idea that when someone's collected poems are published it means that the poet is dead. I found myself looking at my work as if I were at my own funeral.

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.

Mediocrity is not allowed to poets, either by the gods or men.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.

Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else.

Modern poets are bells of lead. They should tinkle melodiously but usually they just klunk.

Most joyful let the Poet be, it is through him that all men see.

Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.

Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be.

Music is the purest form of art... therefore true poets...seek to express the universe in terms of music. The singer has everything within him. The notes come out from his very life. They are not materials gathered from outside.

My dad wanted to name me after Rainier Maria Rilke, the poet.

Neither men, nor gods, nor booksellers' shelves permit ordinary poets to exist. [Lat., Mediocribus esse poetis Non homines, non di, non concessere columnae.]

My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.

My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, "Contradiction is how we operate.

My message is not wholly understood; only poets understand it.

My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.

Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains – beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.

Nature, like a true poet, abhors abrupt transitions.

Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making poets.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.

No bad man can be a good poet.

Nobody has to tell nobody nothing,” I say, taking another step forward. “You never were a poet, were you, Todd?” he says.

No poet or orator has ever existed who believed there was any better than himself.