Poet Quotes

I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.

You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.

But Racine's extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great psychologist.

One travels so as to learn once more how to marvel at life in the way a child does. And blessed be the poet, the artist who knows how to keep alive his sense of wonder.

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.

I'm much more of a musician than a poet. I just feel much more confident about my musical abilities.

According to them, the poet is confined to the provinces with his mouth broken on his own syllabic trapeze.

When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.

The poet must decide not to impose his feelings in order to write without sentimentality.

As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree,' probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. - A theme for a great poet would be God's boredom on the seventh day of creation.

Being identified as a poet in France or Denmark or India one is greeted with gracious respect.

The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.

As fire kindled by fire, so is the poet's mind kindled by contact with a brother poet.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

Jim, as just a spoken poet, was not that good. He needed the music behind him. He felt a security and a sense of abandon when the music existed around him.

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.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

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.

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.