Poet Quotes
I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.
Mark Strand
The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
Gustave Flaubert
Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.
William E. Gladstone
Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
The power of daring anything their fancy suggest, as always been conceded to the painter and the poet.
Horace
I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.
August Wilson
Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time.
Robert Graves
We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.
Jean Giraudoux
I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
Howard Nemerov
The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.
Lionel Trilling
There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
Anthony Hecht
The poet's spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth.
Salvatore Quasimodo
The generous Critic fann'd the Poet's fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.
Edgar Allan Poe
For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.
Joseph Brodsky
Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
Huston Smith
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
George Sand
With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
John Keats
The epic poet collaborates with the spirit of his time in the composition of his work. That is, if he is successful; the time may refuse to work with him, but he may not refuse to work with his time.
Lascelles Abercrombie
As the poet has expected, the alarms now are sounded, for - and it must be said again - the birth of a poet is always a threat to the existing cultural order, because he attempts to break through the circle of literary castes to reach the center.
Salvatore Quasimodo