Top 474 Poet Quotes

At the age of 15, a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how I replied that I wanted to be a poet.

When I came back to New York, it was such a joke because I was always referred to as the pure young poet who wasn’t in it for what he could get out of it. And all of a sudden, the pure young poet comes back… and I’m hanging out with the Rolling Stones.

I think that as a poet, I am always concerned about history and baring witness to history. But so often, it’s through the research that I do, the reading.

Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.

The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life.

I was a serious poet for quite a while and had little notebooks filled with poetry.

I wrote an ITV drama in the 1960s, a satire on management theory that starred Leonard Rossiter. I’m also a poet and have had work in the ‘Spectator.’

The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.

The poet is someone, I think, who’s interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

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.

And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.

It’s a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

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.

Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it’s reflected in his writings.

None merits the name of Creator but God and the poet.

From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue.

But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

I was a piano player before I was a poet.

I know when I go to a poetry reading, I feel purged, exulted. You let the poet guide you through some kind of journey.

The poet’s perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely.

Dante Alighieri is a universal poet, and great creators, they are writing for everybody always. Every single verse is very moving, and the beauty – if we don’t understand, we just stay listening to the sound and it’s like hearing music.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

I am a member of the Muskogee people. I’m a poet, a musician, a dreamer of sorts, a questioner. Like everyone else, I’m looking for answers of some sort or the other.

I can’t believe there is a poet who hasn’t eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It’s part of the process of selection.

According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.

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.

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

I’m a student at Harvard University, and currently work as the United States Youth Poet Laureate, a community organizer, and an activist.

When you see the poet laureate saying that every child should have read ‘Ulysses’ and that you’re just giving up on children if you think it’s elitist – does that include children with special needs or whose first language isn’t English?

There is scarcely anything to which I am so feelingly alive as the honour and welfare of my country, and, as a poet, I have no higher enjoyment than singing her sons and daughters.

I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.

The writer, the poet, the novelist, are all creators. This does not mean that they invent language; it means that they use language to create beauty, ideas, images. This is why we cannot do without them.

When men are prosperous, they are in love with life. Nature grows beautiful, the arts begin to flourish, there is work for painter and sculptor, the poet is born, the stage is erected – and this life with which men are in love is represented in a thousand forms.

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.

A good rapper is an amazing thing to me. It’s like a 17th-, 18th-century poet.

I’m not literary, and I’m not academic, and I don’t think like a poet, so my stuff will never be like that.

It is always a disappointment to turn from forthright consideration of some subject – whether from the Left or the Right, a poet or a plumber – to the Beltway version, in which the only aspects of the issue that matter are the effects it will have on the fortunes of the two parties and the various men in power.

The power of daring anything their fancy suggest, as always been conceded to the painter and the poet.

Everyone is their own kind of poet – you can’t miss it when their words are written down.

The man of science is nothing if not a poet gone wrong.

A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.

My brother told me I was going to be a poet. I had a good brother. He did a lot of good brotherly work.

The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture.

When Castro was put on trial in 1953 by Batista’s government and asked who was intellectually responsible for his first attempt at insurrection, he dropped the name of the poet Jose Marti.

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.

Ambiguity around ambiguity is forgivable in an unpublished poet and expected of an arts student on the pull: for a professional comedian demoting himself to the role of ‘thinker’, with stadiums full of young people hanging on his every word, it won’t really do.

But the lover’s power is the poet’s power. He can make love from all the common strings with which this world is strung.

The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.

With lyrics, being a poet gave me a different approach than other people.

My own journey in becoming a poet began with memory – with the need to record and hold on to what was being lost. One of my earliest poems, ‘Give and Take,’ was about my Aunt Sugar, how I was losing her to her memory loss.

I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the world’s greatest dramatic poet, but regret that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the hands of his daughter, and therefore I have prepared the Family Shakespeare.

Astronomers have been bewildered by the theory of an expanding universe, but there is no less expansion in the moral infinite of the universe of man. As far as the frontiers of science are pushed back, over the extended arc of these frontiers one will hear the poet’s hounds on the chase.