Poet Quotes

I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.

The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.

Are you really going to see Lewis? One of the few people it's worth getting excited over, I think. I know he is a good poet. I daresay he never heard of me, but I wish you would tell him that his work is the joy of my life.

A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.

For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.

In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.

I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the world's greatest dramatic poet, but regret that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the hands of his daughter, and therefore I have prepared the Family Shakespeare.

I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's.

The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.

I've always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, "Truth is the daughter of Time."

I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.