Best 1314 quotes in «poet quotes» category

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Keelhaul the poets in the vestry chairs.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.