Best 1314 quotes in «poet quotes» category

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Not being a poet, I prize truth above beauty.

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 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.

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.

Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill.

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

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

[On Elizabeth Barrett Browning:] ... for finish, and melody of versification, there is nothing approaching to Miss Barrett in this day, or in any other - also for diction. Her words paint.

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.

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.

Only those of our poets who kept solidly to the Shakespearean tradition achieved any measure of success. But Keats was the last great exponent of that tradition, and we all know how thin, how lacking in charm, the copies of Keats have become.

One thing about being a children's poet or a versifier, is that there is a large market for your wares. These things really made the rounds. I would meet people and they'd quote my poems to me. It's great.

Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered.

On sighting mathematicians poetry should unhook the algebra from their minds and replace it with poetry; on sighting poets it should unhook poetry from their minds and replace it with algebra.

One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is "Whatever you do, don't be boring.

Only the poets can hold the country together, and I wanted to hold Germany together.

Pain makes hens and poets cackle.

O woman! thou wert fashioned to beguile: So have all sages said, all poets sung.

Our goal is to publish African poets in as many ways as possible.

Our job is to become more and more of what we are. The growth of a poet seems to be related to his or her becoming less and less embarrassed about more and more.

Our Poets make us laugh at Tragœdy, And with their Comoedies they make us cry.

Painters and poets have equal license in regard to everything.

Part of the glamour of being a poet was always this long reach into the future. You knew you were managing time.

Painters and poets alike have always had license to dare anything! We know that, and we both claim and allow to others in their turn this indulgence.

Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one.

Paul [ Burwell] and I had also got interested in making books. We'd been working with Bob Cobbing, the sound poet, since the beginning of the 70s, and Bob had this press called Writers Forum.

Paul Valery speaks of the 'une ligne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself.

Perhaps...I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am a lesbian, because I am myself--a Black woman warrior poet doing my work--come to ask you, are you doing yours?

Poet and sculptor, do the work, / Nor let the modish painter shirk

Poetics is a science for stammering poets.

Pilgrims are poets who create by taking journeys.

Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.

Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familiar, eternalizing the poet's own perception in unique and original verbal form.

Poets alone are sure of immortality; they are the truest diviners of nature.

Poets and monks... We're both sort of peripheral to the world.

Poets are born, not paid.