Poet Quotes

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 good poet sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race.

So, I've never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don't want to be read as just a black poet, or just a woman poet, or just someone who represents a cause, an anti-Vietnam war poet.

Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.

A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure.

The violinist must possess the poet's gift of piercing the protective hide which grows on propagandists, stockbrokers and slave traders, to penetrate the deeper truth which lies within.

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear.

The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.

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

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.

I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.

You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.

The time of illusion, then, is the beautiful moment of passion; it represents the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to be free to do the very best that he can.

I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.

There is no more reason why the features belonging to a picture should be distorted for the purpose of such imaginative suggestion than that the poet's metaphors should spoil his words for the ordinary uses of man.

I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.

According to them, the poet is confined to the provinces with his mouth broken on his own syllabic trapeze.

When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.

The poet must decide not to impose his feelings in order to write without sentimentality.

As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree,' probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. - A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom on the seventh day of creation.

Being identified as a poet in France or Denmark or India one is greeted with gracious respect.