Best 1314 quotes in «poet quotes» category

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

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

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 was an epiphany when I realized you don't have to call yourself a linguist, a translator, a poet. You can call yourself an artist and you can do all these things.

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

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

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 would hardly change the sorrowful words of the poets for their glad ones. Tears dampen the strings of the lyre, but they grow the tensor for it, and ring even the clearer and more ravishingly.

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 too slow a mover to be a boxer. It was much easier to be a poet.

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

I would enjoy having dinner with the poet/playwright Derek Walcott.

I would like to be a philosopher in ancient Athens and a poet in ancient China.

I was a piano player before I was a poet.

I was a serious poet for quite a while and had little notebooks filled with poetry.

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.

I wouldn't be happy about being considered a love poet or an environmental - I don't want any of those tags.

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.

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

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

Keelhaul the poets in the vestry chairs.

[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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.