Poet Quotes

I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry.

From the throes of inspiration and the eddies of thought the poet may at last be able to arrive at, and convey the right admixture of words and meaning.

A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

It has often struck me that the relation of two important members of the social body to one another has never been sufficiently considered, or treated of, so far as I know, either by the philosopher or the poet.

In 1967, the students at San Francisco State invited the poet Amiri Baraka to the campus for a semester. He attracted other influential black writers such as Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins, Eldridge Cleaver. What emerged was something we called the community communications program. That's how I got involved; I got involved in a little play.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.

A man may be variously accomplished, and yet be a feeble poet.

The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind him too; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather more strictly compelling.

Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.

I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely.

Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.

Everything on this record is what I really wanted to say, and I'm back to being the poet I always thought I was.

I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.

A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet.

The poet is a madman lost in adventure.

Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.

The word poet literally means maker: anything which is not well made doesn't exist.

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects.

Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish.

To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men.

They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

When I talk of hearing a poet's voice speaking, I always think of it as in the presence of the man.

So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.

From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue.

My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

The music is the shining path over which the poet travels to bring his song to the world.