Top 250 Poets Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Poets Quotes from famous people such as Justin Cartwright, D. H. Lawrence, Rupi Kaur, Robert Adamson, Mary Oliver, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

My brother and I were brought up sort of thinking that

My brother and I were brought up sort of thinking that we were English. I remember hearing the poet Roy Campbell on the radio and being quite shocked that he had a South African accent. I didn’t know there were any South African poets.
Justin Cartwright
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.
D. H. Lawrence
When I was little, my dad told me about Anandpur Sahib and the court of Guru Gobind Singh. That we came from a tradition of poets, warriors and artists who created when it was illegal to create… we’re groomed to be reckless in the defense of what we feel is right.
Rupi Kaur
He was certainly in a confused state. I used to go and visit him in Callan Park. They were really – to me they were the best poets those two writing in those days but it wasn’t very encouraging because, well, they weren’t getting far were they?
Robert Adamson
I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.
Mary Oliver
I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.
Heraclitus
Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.
Robert Frost
All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.
Harold Bloom
There was a time when poetry often made its way to vinyl; take a deep dive, for example, into the beat poets’ countercultural albums of the 1950s to ’80s.
Elizabeth Flock
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.
Marilyn Hacker
I’m inspired by the poets, so I’m always going to give in that direction, rather than in any other. It’s the making of me… and also the downfall of me.
Roy Harper
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T. S. Eliot
When I first got to Motown, Smokey was already a fixture there. To me, he is one of the greatest songwriters and poets, so anything they ask me to do for Smokey is going to get a yes.
Dennis Edwards
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.
James Broughton
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.
Christopher Dawson
Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions.
Edward Hirsch
When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.
John Crowe Ransom
Pleasure has ever more been represented by poets and by painters as clothed in perpetual smiles and adorned with the richest jewels; and in real life, we have known many who, allured by her deceptions, blandishments, and hollow but showy temptations, have followed as she pointed until ruin has befallen them.
John Tyler
I love art, and it plays a huge role in my life. It’s definitely one of my greatest joys, and I’m a bit fanatical about certain painters and poets and musicians and sculptors.
Jandy Nelson
I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.
Francine Prose
Rumi, who is one of the greatest Persian poets, said that the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf
I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.
Pat Conroy
I’m inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I’m good at it.
Mos Def
In the early days of the Libertines, we used to put on Arcadian cabaret nights. There’d be some girl climbing out of an egg; we’d try and get a couple of mates to tell a few jokes, performance poets, and then we’d play in the middle of it all. More people were on stage than in the crowd.
Pete Doherty
The community of poets I belong to is not as close as it used to be, if only for the fact that our lives have become busier: jobs, children, and the like.
John Barton
I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.
Charles Olson
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
Plato
I always thought I was going to be a great poet, and go and live in New York, where the great poets lived – you know, where Whitman had walked the streets.
Garth Risk Hallberg
But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?
H. P. Lovecraft
Let the poets cry themselves to sleep, and all their tearful words will turn back into steam.
Conor Oberst
It’s very important to say that French doesn’t belong to France and to French people. Now you have very wonderful poets and writers in French who are not French or Algerian – who are from Senegal, from Haiti, from Canada, a lot of parts of the world.
Leila Slimani
At this moment, by an undeserved stroke of fortune, I a

At this moment, by an undeserved stroke of fortune, I am the direct voice of the poets of my race and the indirect voice for the noble Spanish and Portuguese tongues.
Gabriela Mistral
Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.
Jim Jarmusch
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.
Anita Diament
I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
Socrates
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.
Andrew Motion
Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
J. D. Salinger
I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn’t some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that’s happening around us.
Rita Dove
Someone told me just recently that poets are eulogists. It’s their job, to eulogize. I didn’t know that, but it makes sense. Because in almost every poem of mine there is a loss.
Dan Quisenberry
I envy poets because nobody ever asks them if it’s true or false.
Hilton Als
I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I’m an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists.
Ian Mcewan
But there is some way in which poets believe that and this is dangerous, too believe that their calling gives them a certain freedom. A certain freedom to live in a free way.
Peter Davison
Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
Aristotle
Poets take themselves very seriously.
Grace Paley
The public is probably more suspicious of poets than women, and maybe for good reason.
Billy Collins
I truly hate marketing promotions, and I don’t at all approve of encouraging wannabe poets to write bad poetry.
Anne Stevenson
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; – poetry = the best words in the best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The craftless anarchy of the Beat poets on the one hand, and the extreme control of Henry James on the other, suggest that for most human beings, just as both freedom and discipline are necessary in life, serendipity and design must coexist in a work to make it readable.
Mark Helprin
As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.
Jean Giraudoux
Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.
Samuel Beckett
The American public does not know poets exist.
James Broughton
Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.
Donald Hall
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
Zelda Fitzgerald
To a poet, it’s quite ruinous to have a poem distorted, out of shape, or squeezed, shall we say, into this tiny screen. But I’m not sure big digital companies are sensitive to the needs of poets.
Billy Collins
And thus it was that I started to wonder why Robert Burns is so important to us. We have other poets, and other writers, and other heroes, yet we do not afford them the veneration that we afford to Robert Burns.
Len G. Murray
The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business. The greater the ‘genius’ of the personage, the greater the profit.
George Grosz
There is no one more deserving of a place in Poets’ Corner. Ted Hughes introduced a new kind of landscape into English poetry. The most compelling aspect of his work was his intimacy with nature.
Derek Walcott
If I were a teacher, I would like to teach freshman English – so I could be the Robin Williams type in ‘Dead Poets Society.’
Jake Johnson
I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I’ve always delighted in the company of the poets I’ve read.
Edward Hirsch