Best 1314 quotes in «poet quotes» category

In love, a verse of Mimnermus has more power than one of Homer.

In living off all the reflecting light furnished by poets, the I which dreams the reverie reveals itself not as poet but as poetizing I.

In the end, time is the best ally of poets. It clarifies their works and makes them accessible to an ever widening circle of readers.

In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet

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

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things

I once saw a picture in the paper of John Hegley with 'poet' written on his knuckles, and I thought that was pretty cool, so I was quite up front about it.

I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.

Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.

I secretly assumed, as poets do, The duty on me to define the moon.

Inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet.

Inside every man there is a poet who died young.

In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.

In the years 1910 and 1911 I had 51 innings with 10 not outs and an average of 19. This I consider a creditable record for a poet.

In truth, I'm still slightly embarrassed to say, I am a poet. I'd rather say, I make poems.

Isn't it interesting that all of the biblical prophets and psalmists were poets?

I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.

I think I've always felt very isolated, and I'm sure lots of poets do.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.

I think poets tell better history than historians. Historians lie all the time but the poets can get to truth of it.

I think Whitman more than any other poet possessed the gift of revealing to others the beauty of everything around us, the beauty of nature, the beauty of human beings.

I suppose it's useful in designating writing that tends to come from personal experience, work that delineates an "I," but it's a loose lasso, one which may rope certain poems by one poet and not others.

I think Lindsay Kemp really introduced me to the work of Jean Genet, and through that, I kind of kept re-educating myself about other prose writers and poets.

I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.

It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us.

It is bad taste for a poet to be coarse and hairy.

It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.

I thought I was going to be a poet when I was in college, but then I found out I was poor so I decided to do something I'd get paid for.

It is funny, and also a bit sad, that poets are so often asked to justify our vocation. There seems to be something vaguely mystifying and even hilarious to people about being a poet, especially in these times. Why would anyone choose to do something so...useless?

It must be added that from his first words the foreigner made a repellent impression on the poet, but Berlioz rather liked him - that is, not liked but . . . how to put it . . . was interested, or whatever.

It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score.

It often seems that the poet's derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: “With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches the gaps in the structure of the universe.

I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.

It's been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they've got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all.

It's easier to teach a poet how to read a balance sheet than it is to teach an accountant how to write.

It may very well be that we have entered another time when most poets will feel compelled to use poetry to stop things from happening. Yet I believe that even if poetry did not do this, it would be vital to our survival.

It seems more than likely that the translating of poetry is going to rub off on the translator if he or she is a poet.

It took me awhile to not be ashamed to be a poet in the business environment, and to be a business person in the poet environment.

It is the gift of all poets to find the commonplace astonishing, and the astonishing quite natural.

It sounds old-fashioned to say, but we have some kind of purpose for being here, not poets or writers, but all of us humans.

I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

I wanted to be a poet and/or an artist, but I was very lazy (frightened of failure, I guess) and drank too much.

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

I want each poem to be ambiguous enough that its meaning can shift, depending on the reader's own frame of reference, and depending on the reader's mood. That's why negative capability matters; if the poet stops short of fully controlling each poem's meaning, the reader can make the poem his or her own.

I want to be a poet. I don't want to talk about genies in bottles anymore.

I was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about!

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

I would keep in mind to a young poet that you are entering into something that is very important, that has always been important in terms of human concerns.