Poets Quotes

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

The south produced statesmen and soldiers, planters and doctors and lawyers and poets, but certainly no engineers and mechanics. Let Yankees adopt such low callings.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.

Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together.

But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.

A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.

If we're gonna progress as a people we are going to realise that, as one of my favourite poets says, the other is a lie. There are no other people. Race is a social construct.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

Travelers are like poets. They are mostly an angry race.

America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.

Artist - musicians, painters, writers, poets, always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

All poets' wives have rotten lives Their husbands look at them like knives.

And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must educate our masters, labour and capital, in art.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.

Francis Webb is easily our greatest poet and one of the greatest poets in the world but he's hardly ever mentioned.

A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

Travellers, like poets, are mostly an angry race: by falling into a daily fit of passion, I proved to the governor and his son, who were profuse in their attentions, that I was in earnest.

Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot.

But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them.

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.

Let the poets cry themselves to sleep, and all their tearful words will turn back into steam.