Top 250 Poets Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

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.

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.

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 have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions.

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

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.

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.

I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.

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

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.

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

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

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.

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.

Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.

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.

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.

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.

Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

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.

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.

I envy poets because nobody ever asks them if it’s true or false.

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.

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.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

Poets take themselves very seriously.

The public is probably more suspicious of poets than women, and maybe for good reason.

I truly hate marketing promotions, and I don’t at all approve of encouraging wannabe poets to write bad poetry.

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.

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.

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

Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.

The American public does not know poets exist.

Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

If I were a teacher, I would like to teach freshman English – so I could be the Robin Williams type in ‘Dead Poets Society.’

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.

I found poetry at 12 and 13 and, lo and behold, learned that my attorney father had a background in poetry – as he wore dashikis and Afros in the ’70s and named his kids Arabic names. He was a poet and a lot like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all of these folks. He definitely was an artist.

Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.

I’d photographed musicians before but this was different. Syd was very charismatic, and he had the aura of a poete maudit, which made him the perfect subject for me – I realised that rock n’ rollers were the modern equivalent of all the poets I was so enamoured with.

We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.

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.

I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets.

After I’d been in college for a couple years I’d read Shakespeare and Frost and Chaucer and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. I’d come to appreciate how gorgeous the English language could be. But most fantasy novels didn’t seem to make the effort.

There’s a reason poets often say, ‘Poetry saved my life,’ for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul’s suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.

Mysticism, in the narrow sense, implies a specific experience which is foreign to most poets and most men, but on the other hand, it represents an instinct which is a human sine qua non.

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

At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism.

Being in the Sahitya Akademi, I did know quite a few poets – Jayanta Mahapatra, Sitakant Mahapatra, Sunil Gangopadhyay, to name a few. There were many poets.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

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

In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known – that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.

I’ve been trekking the hills and lanes of the British countryside for nearly four decades now and I’ve come to associate my passion with overexcited poets rather than pampered painters.

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.

The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical – their data are in the way they sound. A poet’s biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.

If sexual intercourse, as the poets tell us, began in 1963, it was another decade and a half before the American political system began to take notice.

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.

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

I once said a poet has the right to sing as loudly and vocally as he wants to. Most poets should face a rock n’ roll audience for one night to keep them honest.

When I met Bob Dylan, I was definitely impressed. This guy had come from the American folk world, but he was very schooled in poetry, too. He’d studied the Beat poets, of course. I grew up in the British bohemian scene. Dylan grew up in the American bohemian scene. So I was very pleased to meet such a guy.

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.

We will certainly see teachers, journalists, artists and poets in space. Whatever it takes to the be the best is what it will take to get you into space.

If I were to die thinking that I’d written three poems that people might read after me, I would feel that I hadn’t lived in vain. Great poets might expect the whole body of their work, but most of us – well, I would settle for a handful.

To see the Persia of poets and painters, hiding in plain sight behind the much-maligned Iran of our newspaper headlines, would be my fondest wish.

Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson, Goddard, Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Greco, everybody – Paris for me was a Mecca.

When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.

Has the painter not always gone to an art school, or at least to an established master, for instruction? And the composer, the sculptor, the architect? Then why not the writer? Good poets, like good hybrid corn, are both born and made.

I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I also love more cerebral poets like H.D. and Emily Dickinson. My parents subscribed to a monthly poetry periodical, and as a teenager I was introduced to Denise Levertov, who was an influence.

I think that’s what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves – although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.

Many poets write books. They’ll tell you: Well, I’ve got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.

I’m into the lyrical side of rap. I listen to some old Eminem songs and think, ‘Wow, he’s a genius.’ He’s one of the greatest poets of our time. Even when he’s out of control, like on ‘Cold Wind Blows,’ it’s incredible.

Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.

For this reason poets and artists developed the doctrine of Art for Art’s Sake. The community did not appear to need them, so, tit for tat, they did not need the community. This being granted, it was no longer necessary or even desirable to make one’s poetry either intelligible or sympathetic to the community.

I think the poets and musicians, they belong to everybody.

There are very few great poets in the world.

One of my very favourite poets was a Massachusetts poet named Robert Lowell.

In the Western tradition, the first writers were teachers and historians, vastly traveled, who spiced their reports with fantasies. They were also poets who sang and entertained prince and pauper.

The first thing you see in my hallway is a large 18th-century bust of Milton, who stares at me as I watch TV and reminds me of the grave and committed role of the poet. Although he was blind, Milton had one of the most unswerving gazes of all English poets.

I know who the great poets are.

The scientist and engineers who are building the future need the poets to make sense of it.

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.

Portsmouth has the honor, I believe, of establishing the first recorded pauper workhouse – though not in connection with her poets, as might naturally be supposed.

During the 20th century, Chechnya was written about by local poets and novelists, as well as writers from Russia and Central Asia, but very little is available in English translation.

It is what the poets of Ireland used to be saying, that every brave man, good at fighting, and every man that could do great deeds and not be making much talk about them, was of the Sons of the Gael; and that every skilled man that had music and that did enchantments secretly, was of the Tuatha de Danaan.

I wrote some serious stuff in high school; however, I hadn’t been exposed to any of the major poets, not even the minor ones… I read nothing but Sara Teasdale.

The historical legacy of ‘The Best American Poetry’ is they’ve had very few editors who were not white. They’ve had very few instances where they’ve selected poems by non-white poets.

Lyrics have to be underwritten. That’s why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.

I grew up in Banaras on Kabir and other Hindi poets and then I got introduced to Faiz, Hasrat Mohani, Allama Iqbal and Majaaz. They took me to another facet of literature and drama.

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

People in Ireland take in the whole song. After a long history of great singers and songwriters and poets, they are able to consume the entire song – not just the external; they go inside.

Defeat furnishes good material to the poets and the artists, but none of us care to have the glory of the conquered apply to us.

Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New England, and of English literature generally, as of another order. He is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald, the poet-seer.

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

Poets have to be sensitive to their audience, but it does not mean that they censor themselves. I realise my audience is diverse. Some will read with empathy and curiosity while others will take offense.

It’s been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they’ve got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all.

Being gay facilitated my capacity for shame. As a child, I carried around this thing that gradually became this big dark secret. When I came out in a newspaper interview at 30 I was expecting the reaction the following day to be like the climax of ‘Dead Poets Society,’ but actually no one really cared.

And some poets are far better read off the page because they’re very bad speakers. I’m thinking of one in particular whom I won’t name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.

I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.

Never use the word ‘audience.’ The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don’t have an ‘audience’. They’re talking to a single person all the time.

My father would take me to auditions and put me in the room right in the corner because he was watching me; he couldn’t get a babysitter. He’d be at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the LES until four in the morning, trying to tell his story and using his craft, but because he had a kid that didn’t let him stop.

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.

Some of my favorite poets had a tremendous sense of whimsy, so it’s a writing style I guess I admire.

Poets are not meant to be in competition.

We think that there is this terrible idea that the kids are digital natives… and they know what they’re doing, but all the evidence says that they’re hanging around going, ‘Where are you, I’m here, can I post my picture?’ They’re not actually writing wikis; they’re not actually listening to great poets live.

Artists – 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.

I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.

At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.

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.

Whether they are actual poets or their music exemplifies a poetic sensibility, generally speaking, the Americana artist shuns commercial compromise in favor of a singular vision. Which resonates with me.

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

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

If you want poets in space, you’ll have to wait.

Hip-hop is getting to the point now where they are going to start sounding like Al Jarreau or Bobby McFerrin or some of the other poets. Some of the better rappers can rap real fast without even melodies. It’ll get to that same point.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

Most poets in their youth begin in adolescent sadness. I find it more rewarding to end in gladness.

Perhaps the old monks were right when they tried to root love out; perhaps the poets are right when they try to water it. It is a blood-red flower, with the color of sin; but there is always the scent of a god about it.

I have a strange relationship with influences because mine are mostly literary or painters or poets, who I’ll even quote. I don’t do tributes to cinema.

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.

Poets are Damned… but See with the Eyes of Angels.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

The Romantic poets were the prototype ramblers, and I’ve often found myself following in their footsteps – although perhaps not all of their footsteps since a typical walk for Samuel T. Coleridge might last two days and cover 145km.

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.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one.

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

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

When I used to listen to the poets in other languages and the kind of appreciation they received, I wanted to be there on the dais and experience that myself.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life, I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.

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

Hip-hop started with street poets with great lyrical skills, and that’s what hip-hop has always been about for me.

Many poets in Iran have learned to speak almost a secret language, where political issues are talked about in allegorical ways.

I don’t see my artist friends as any more neurotic or addiction-prone than the others. The roommates I have had who were into triathlons or environmentalism were just as crazy as the poets, just as prone to tears over gardening or air conditioners, just as ready to kite a cheque or binge on cookie dough.

All poets are idlers, even if all idlers are not poets.

With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that’s why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.

Believe it or not, one of the first poets I was aware of was Yeats. I recited ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ at a verse speaking competition when I was eight or nine.

Modern storytellers are the descendants of an immense and ancient community of holy people, troubadours, bards, griots, cantadoras, cantors, traveling poets, bums, hags, and crazy people.

By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation: those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan… In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.

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.

I’m very proud of the fact that I’m one of Britain’s biggest selling poets. That gives me a huge amount of pleasure.

You have to write some poetry, first of all, to decide if you can become a lyricist. I was born in a family of poets.

They say poets write mostly for themselves; if anyone else likes it, well and good, if not, it doesn’t matter; certainly, not to me.

There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.

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

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, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.

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

You may be guided by the unending effort of poets and artists, biologists and psychiatrists to describe that irreplaceable and still mysterious emotion so essential to the human condition, but all the search engines in the universe cannot compete with the first kiss.

Dabbling with Tagore was always scary. It happens with masters, with contemporary poets you know their vibes and their meaning. Tagore was different; his aura and the feel of his language was different.

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

Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.

Poets don’t draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

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

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

Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality.

The great poets have sympathized with the people. They have uttered in all ages the human cry. Unbought by gold, unawed by power, they have lifted high the torch that illuminates the world.

Well, it’s a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. 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.

I didn’t know any poets growing up in Kansas.

The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.

I think one of the things that language poets are very involved with is getting away from conventional ideas of beauty, because those ideas contain a certain attitude toward women, certain attitudes toward sex, certain attitudes toward race, etc.

New voices in an old art – and women poets have been that for much more than a century – do not diminish the art through the category. They enrich it. They renew it with common quandaries of craft and innovation. The category simply allows the quandaries to be seen more clearly.

I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate, and there are some critics who have no ear for it. An irresponsible critic can do a lot of psychic damage, but eventually, they don’t affect your work.

I feel very connected to poets across the country.

It’s difficult to get films made, especially films about poets.

Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.

I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say, your professional poets, I mean there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.

The lovely daisy, so justly celebrated by European poets, is not a native of our soil; we know it well, however, by cultivation in our gardens and green houses; besides, we are disposed to remember it for the sake of those who have sung its praises in immortal verse.

I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

Of poets I put Virgil first – he was greatest.

When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read – Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier – were rhyme poets. That’s what captured me.

I think ‘Dead Poets’ was probably my favorite, just to get started with the idea of doing a movie that people treated as more than a movie.

I don’t like the word ‘poetry,’ and I don’t like poetry readings, and I usually don’t like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I’m kind of a curator, and I’m kind of a night-owl reporter.

But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.

I’m an amalgam of the 19th-century romantics and the beat poets.

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

I am happy that I could collaborate with poets like O.N.V. Kurup and Yusufali Kechery in my career; they wrote meaningful lyrics, which made my songs last longer.

The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals – its philosophers, its poets and its artists.

Poets, I think, are born. You can’t teach it. It’s genetic – the circumstances of how you were raised… and there’s probably some Irish in your blood lines.

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

I’m not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.

Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something – with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.

Poets are always making waves. I mean, you know, in an ideal situation, the ideal republic can’t tolerate poets because – it isn’t that they mutter and criticize; it is that the poet does not accept the situation called the ‘perfect’ condition of man – in other words, perfect in the materialistic sense.

When I got to Grinnell College, I was part of the black turtleneck sweater and Camel cigarette crowd of poets and writers.

I hear poets complaining: ‘We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that.’

Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.

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

Amy Winehouse and Paul Weller are examples of poets, I think.

Even the greatest poets can’t express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.

The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind.

If you read the poets of the 19th century in Latin America, you would see that Havana or Mexico City or Buenos Aires are incredibly modern and global cities that they were not. And eventually they became real, and they became real because people read these books and tried to live in a better world.

Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.

I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.

I can’t look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do.

Good poets borrow; great poets steal.

There is an extraordinary degree of amity among Washington poets. They hang together. You would be hard pressed to find that in Manhattan.

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

When I was ten, I spent a school holiday watching a lot of films: ‘Dead Poets Society’, ‘Stand By Me’, ‘Home Alone’ and ‘The Goonies’. It completely inspired me. I told my parents I wanted to become an actor after that.

Poetry itself hasn’t been well served by poets who fled to the margins.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

I still believe many poets begin in fear and hope: fear that the poetic past will turn out to be a monologue rather than a conversation. And hope that their voice can be heard as that past turns into a future.

Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country’s poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain.

I love poetry. I love rhyming. Do you know, there are poets who don’t rhyme? Shakespeare did not rhyme most of the time, and that’s why I do not like him.

Poets often are dealing with history and are thinking about the way history moves across us, and we move in it.

You go to a Springsteen show, and half of the people are there to party and forget about their cares, and they’re being drawn to this visceral experience. And then the other half, you know, has lived and died with his ‘Nebraska’ album and considers him one of the greatest poets.

These poets (fans of whatever) should be contacting other young poets on their way – not those who have made it, who sit on a star and then have plenty of problems: usually no money, usually the fear their own writing is going down the sink hole.

‘Ageism,’ or whatever you want to call it, is a very English phenomenon. You don’t get it too much in many other cultures. And no one says it about authors or poets or filmmakers. ‘Oh, they’re too old to make films or write books.’

The way I process things, they way I express myself, is in comics, just as poets process things that they are trying to understand.

Even the greatest poets, I think, cannot quite get to the places that music can get to in the human – I was gonna say mind, but it’s actually the entire body. It somehow seems to infuse the entire body.

I’ve always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

The poet’s other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.

It is strange, how quickly people want to obligate their poets, as it were, on the exile.

The only nice poets I’ve ever met were bad poets, and a bad poet is not a poet at all – ergo, I’ve never met a nice poet.

Many performance poets seem to believe that yelling a poem makes it comprehensible. They are wrong.

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I’m just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they’ve used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever.

The day Obama got into office, rap was less important because Obama gave kids an alternative. But will rap ever go away? No. There will always be a need for poets.

I love Black poets. I love that as a Black girl, I get to participate in that legacy. So that’s Yusef Komunyakaa, Sonia Sanchez, Tracy K. Smith, Phillis Wheatley.

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.

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

I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I’ll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.

I had a country upbringing in a predominantly Maori community, and that contrasted with a very multi-cultured arts community in the Aro Valley in Wellington: growing up around a lot of theatre and poets and writers and stuff.

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.

Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.