Best 1314 quotes in «poet quotes» category

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

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.

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 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 bad taste for a poet to be coarse and hairy.

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

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

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

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 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 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 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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

Keelhaul the poets in the vestry chairs.

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

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

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

Lesbians are the poets of the humanity of women.

[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.

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 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.

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