Poet Quotes

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.

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.

The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.

In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.

And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.

Is encouragement what the poet needs? Open question. Maybe he needs discouragement. In fact, quite a few of them need more discouragement, the most discouragement possible.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist.

It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.

The antagonism between the poet and the politician has generally been evident in all cultures.

All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.

I earn more than I thought I would when I became a poet.

The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many scientists refused to grant him a hearing because he was a poet and therefore, they felt, he couldn't be serious.

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so.

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

When the theater gates open, a mob pours inside, and it is the poet's task to turn it into an audience.

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

I have written a raucous valentine to a poet's dream and agony.

With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.