Poets Quotes

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.

All kids, when they go to school, are pretty good artists and dancers and singers and poets. All that gets buried, basically through being educated, or brainwashed.

Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.

Poets are people who can still see the world through the eyes of children.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.

I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.

The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.

San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.

I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.

In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.

Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.

I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen.

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony.

Out of the thousands who are known or who want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes, hanging around the sacred precincts, trying to look like the real thing.

Most poets are elitist dregs more concerned with proving their skill with a dictionary than communicating ideas with impact.

I feel very connected to poets across the country.

Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.

At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.

Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.

When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart's the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.