Poet Quotes

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

I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.

There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.

You will find the poet who wrings the heart of the world, or the foremost captain of his time, driving a bargain or paring a potato, just as you would do.

The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet.

Thus, the poet's word is beginning to strike forcefully upon the hearts of all men, while absolute men of letters think that they alone live in the real world.

Every dad who loves his daughter is not going to want her to go with the penniless slacker loser poet bum, when she could go out with someone who's successful.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: Can't live with them, or without them.

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.

Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

We met with the poet Frank O'Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings.

Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.

In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.

Is encouragement what the poet needs? Open question. Maybe he needs discouragement. In fact, quite a few of them need more discouragement, the most discouragement possible.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist.