Best 1314 quotes in «poet quotes» category

Lesbians are the poets of the humanity of women.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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, 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 poet or orator has ever existed who believed there was any better than himself.

No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.

Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.

Not being a poet, I prize truth above beauty.

Not by wisdom do they [poets] make what they compose, but by a gift of nature and an inspiration similar to that of the diviners and the oracles.

Not deep the poet sees, but wide.

Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill.

Now, I like a church service, but this was one of those write-your-own-vows sorts of things. Neither of them had ever picked up a pen in their life, but all of a sudden they’re poets, right, like that’s all it takes — being in love.

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.

Old empires always appeal to modern poets more than new ones.

Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned.