Poet Quotes

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 lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

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.

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.

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

The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.

As fire kindled by fire, so is the poet's mind kindled by contact with a brother poet.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

Jim, as just a spoken poet, was not that good. He needed the music behind him. He felt a security and a sense of abandon when the music existed around him.

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.

But Racine's extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great psychologist.

One travels so as to learn once more how to marvel at life in the way a child does. And blessed be the poet, the artist who knows how to keep alive his sense of wonder.

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.