Poet Quotes

God, eldest of Poets.

— William Watson

I'm a poet.

— Rajon Rondo

Poets tell many lies.

— Solon

“Give a poet a pen”

— A. Jarrell Hayes

“I am an i poet.”

— E.E. Cummings

My fave poet

— Anonymous

“Memory is a poet, not a historian.”

— Paul Geraldy

Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?

— Carlos Drummond de Andrade

To be a poet you have to experiment.

— Matthea Harvey

A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer.

— Jack Spicer

Poet's food is love and fame.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“I am part of all that I have met.”

— Alfred Lord Tennyson

Painters and poets have liberty to lie.

— Robert Burns

A poet is a good citizen turned inside out.

— William Butler Yeats

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.

— Paul Engle

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke

— Max Eastman

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Spirit is a child, the tune of dancing feet its lullaby.”

— Shah Asad Rizvi

RIMER, n. A poet regarded with indifference or disesteem.

— Ambrose Bierce

In the streets the children screamed. The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed

— Don McLean

I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.

— Anne Stevenson

My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.

— Anne Sexton

Every man or woman is a potential poet or artist. Everyone has the capacity to bring to their work the dignity, purposefulness,…

— Laurence Boldt

If you want to understand poetry, You have to go to its origin, If you want to understand the poet, You have…

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Love withers but never dies. Its tendrils are embedded on fecund soil awaiting the nourishing spring to make it sprout once more.”

— Yefon Isabelle

The poet is like the wise fool or like a version of the stand-up, because we're standing, we're doing stand-up. That's exactly…

— Eileen Myles

Really, he thought, if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?

— Neil Gaiman

All beautiful things bring sadness, nor alone Sweet music, as our wisest Poet spake, Because in us keen longings they awake.

— Richard Chenevix Trench

I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was…

— Grace Paley

“Her thoughts became mysteriously tightened and strung up as if a piano tuner had put his key in her back and stretched…

— Virginia Woolf

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic,…

— Jeanette Winterson

In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the…

— Al Alvarez

The willed recovery of what's been lost - often forcibly, I suppose - is what keeps me going. It is this reason…

— Kevin Young

Drill in exact translation is an excellent way of disposing the mind against that looseness and exaggeration with which the sensationalists have…

— Richard M. Weaver

Women are very different to men, and that hasn't been respected. So when people say there's never been a good woman painter…

— Joanna Lumley

I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school…

— Mary Oliver

Now, I like a church service, but this was one of those write-your-own-vows sorts of things. Neither of them had ever picked…

— David Sedaris

What I might do is watch Mrs Doubtfire. Or Dead Poets Society or Good Will Hunting and I might be nice to…

— Russell Brand

“And 'tis a pretty toy to be a poet.”

— Christopher Marlowe

“Birds are the eyes of Heaven.”

— Suzy Kassem