Poet Quotes

And me happiest when I compose poems: Love, power, the huzza of battle are something, are much: yet a poem includes them like a pool water and reflection.

How many modern transsexuals are unacknowledged shamans? Perhaps it is to poets they should go for counsel, rather than surgeons.

Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths.

How poetry comes to the poet is a mystery.

Unhappie Verse, the witnesse of my unhappie state, Make thy selfe fluttring wings of thy fast flying Thought

There is a pleasure in poetic pains / Which only poets know.

For, whom the Muses smile upon, And touch with soft persuasion, His words like a storm-wind can bring Terror and beauty on their wing; In his every syllable Lurketh nature veritable.

A poem's life and death dependeth still Not on the poet's wits, but reader's will.

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

I'm not the kind of poet who arranges treasure-hunts to please the academics and keep them busy. Poetry should be surprising in deeper ways.

Rhyme and meter force gaps in meaning so the muse can enter.

To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.

The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely.

The definition of good prose is proper words in their proper places; of good verse, the most proper words in their proper places.The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.

The true poet is called to take in the splendor of the world and for that reason will always be inclined to praise rather than tofind fault.

When the exceptional historian comes along, you have a poet.

The prostitute is the scapegoat for everyone's sins, and few people care whether she is justly treated or not. Good people have spent thousands of pounds in efforts to reform her, poets have written about her, essayists and orators have made her the subject of some of their most striking rhetoric; perhaps no class of people has been so much abused, and alternatively sentimentalized over as prostitutes have been but one thing they have never yet had, and that is simple legal justice.

What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it.

It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back.

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

Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.

In every good poem everything must be both deliberate and instinctive. That is how the poem becomes ideal.

The poet is he who fights on the passionate Side and whoever loses he wins; when he Is defeated it is hard to say who wins.

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man.

We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.

Rap isn't poetry, not least because it involves music and often other elements that aren't words. But the way poets in English use things like rhyme and meter, and the ways these conventions both do and don't apply to rap we try to lay out the rules for rap, in order to understand the techniques that artists like Jay-Z and Kanye employ.

The poet is always our contemporary.

The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

Poets are political, they have to be reflections of their times [because] they're living in their times... Poetry is political in that it's standing in opposition to fascism. Good poetry asks a bunch of questions and asks the audience to interact with themselves or see themselves in it; maybe you like it or you don't like it. But the fascist sort of stuff plays on your fears and tells you to jump on the party line and gives some simple excuses - blame this person.

Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side, And madness chooses out my voice again, Again.

I pulled a book by Robinson Jeffers off the shelf one day. It was powerfully moving. Tears ran down my face. That's when I became a poet.

My path to poetry was slow and meandering. When I eventually found my way to graduate school at 29, making a life as a poet seemed like a bohemian fantasy. But maybe my zigzagging trajectory is just an excuse for tardiness, when fear is really the root of any reason I might give. My perfectionism and pace are certainly driven by fear that a poem is imperfect or incomplete. More significantly, my struggle to fully dedicate myself to poetry was a fear of failure.

The category "Women Poets" is bizarre and irrelevant. It's a subcategory of Poets, but there is not a "Men Poets" category.

I was strong and tough enough and charming. / How else is a fat Jew lesbian poet gonna get by? / Listening to the radio, staying home, staying alone, like / they mean us to. / Who means you to be left out? / Who don't?

The poet presents the imagination with images from life and human characters and situations, sets them all in motion and leaves itto the beholder to let these images take his thoughts as far as his mental powers will permit. This is why he is able to engage men of the most differing capabilities, indeed fools and sages together. The philosopher, on the other hand, presents not life itself but the finished thoughts which he has abstracted from it and then demands that the reader should think precisely as, and precisely as far as, he himself thinks. That is why his public is so small.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

Why must ancients, and provided the same talent, be better than modern authors? Free to exploit the vast realm of the simpleand the natural, they did not have to be artificial in order to be original (which every artist aspires to be).

A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.

You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.

Through the ingenuousness of her age beamed an ardent mind, a mind not of the women but of the poet; she did not please, she intoxicated.

Great is the art, Great be the manners, of the bard. He shall not his brain encumber With the coil of rhythm and number; But, leaving rule and pale forethought, He shall aye climb For his rhyme. "Pass in, pass in," the angels say

I try not to think in terms of what poems or poets should do. Most of us appreciate a wide diversity in music, in cooking, in movies, but in our own medium, poetry, we often fail to make allowances for tastes and projects other than our own.

Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.

For men may prove and use their friends, as the poet expresses it, usque ad aras, meaning that a friend should not be required to act contrary to the law of God.

You admire, Vacerra, only the poets of old and praise only those who are dead. Pardon me, I beseech you, Vacerra, if I think death too high a price to pay for your praise.

A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.

Of little use, the man you may suppose, Who says in verse what others say in prose; Yet let me show a poet's of some weight, And (though no soldier) useful to the state, What will a child learn sooner than a song? What better teach a foreigner the tongue? What's long or short, each accent where to place And speak in public with some sort of grace?

Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back.

Whatever is genuine in social relations endures, despite of time, error, absence, and destiny; and that which has no inherent vitality had better die at once. A great poet has truly declared that constancy is no virtue, but a fact.