Poet Quotes

Then, of course, there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown, and one has to let them go because they're just not making headway. But we have a very clear personal relationship with the authors.

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

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

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?

I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.

And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

I think there's a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that's a beautiful line.

To me, seeing a really great comedian is a bit like watching a musician or a poet.

Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it's reflected in his writings.

To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.

The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, 'A civilization is judged only in its decline.' That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players.

Potter is jealous of potter, and craftsman of craftsman; and the poor have a grudge against the poor, and the poet against the poet.

Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children's future.

I like to think that I'm a sort of poet for our times.

The poet does not fear death, not because he believes in the fantasy of heroes, but because death constantly visits his thoughts and is thus an image of a serene dialogue.

Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.

No poet or orator has ever existed who believed there was any better than himself.

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.

An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses about the truths of the mind or of things.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

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.