Poet Quotes

It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.

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

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.

Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.

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

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.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

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.

I am no Poet here; my pen's the spout where the rain water of my eyes run out.

If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination.

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.

But the lover's power is the poet's power. He can make love from all the common strings with which this world is strung.

Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.

It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back.

A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.