Poet Quotes

But maybe it's up in the hills under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is always only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

I think Whitman more than any other poet possessed the gift of revealing to others the beauty of everything around us, the beauty of nature, the beauty of human beings.

The power of daring anything their fancy suggest, as always been conceded to the painter and the poet.

Why should the composer be more guilty than the poet who warms to fantasy by a strange flame, making an idea that inspires him the subject of his own very different treatment?

Dream study impacts culture. We are put in touch with the inner poet who dreams. We hear our inner, subjective response to the outer world. That helps spiritualize our lives.

The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.

The poet does not know - often he will never know - whom he really writes for.

I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.

If people connect me with the Romantics in general, they probably connect me most with Keats. But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

Tennyson seems to be the patron saint of the wishy washies, which is perhaps why I admire him so much, not only as a poet, but as a man.

We are proud to have with us the poet lariat of Chicago.

We used to play the underground clubs like the UFO, and Middle Earth, and they were great because they would have on things like a poet, string quartets, and then a rock band! It was kinda cool!

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 poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.

But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.