Poets Quotes

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.

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.

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

The poets' scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by death.

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.

Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors.

There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.

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.

I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.

When I began writing, I didn't read any other children's poets... I didn't want to be influenced until I'd found my own voice. Now I read them all.

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.

In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old.

Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.