Poet Quotes

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.

When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.

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!

But you have to understand that I consider myself a very modest artist, or whatever, and not of importance really at all - it is quite embarrassing to me to be asked my opinion about things. I am only a wee Scottish poet on the outside of everything.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

I express myself in sculpture since I am not a poet.

The violinist is that peculiarly human phenomenon distilled to a rare potency - half tiger, half poet.

Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet.

That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.

It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.

Then, of course, there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown, and one has to let them go because they're just not making headway. But we have a very clear personal relationship with the authors.

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?

I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

I think there's a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that's a beautiful line.